These pamphlets will be launched online on 4 May, 7pm UK time. Sign up here!
- Lisa Kelly, From the IKEA Back Catalogue
These poems are preoccupied with how IKEA, as a global corporation, uses language and marketing terms to create iconic products that will find their way into our homes and are part of a disposable culture opposed to a more sustainable way of living. When the language is freed from its corporate mould and the explicit aim to sell, other worlds and stories suggest themselves. The poems attempt to resist the orbit of the corporation and its intent to subsume language into currency and profit.
“Wandering the claustrophobic and endless aisles of IKEA, Lisa’s imagination delves into language and draws on inspiration from the likes of William Carlos Williams and Anton Chekov.” Briony Bax
- William Wootten, Looking at the Horsemen
The poems in this pamphlet range across settings, subjects and eras: from Christ at the workbench, to rats on a plague ship, to life on a far planet. They may darkly reimagine fictional ideals – whether of shepherds or superheroes – or give elaborate shape to uncomfortable truths. Still, the poems’ most persistent preoccupation is time. They can look forward from the past, or back from the future, or simply catch the moment the season turns.
“There is nothing, one feels, this poet could not have language do.”
Jonathan Edwards