Brother Poem
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- £10.99
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- £10.99
Publisher Description
A speculative-poetic work from the Forward Prize-winning, T.S. Eliot shortlisted author of RENDANG.
At the heart of Brother Poem is a sequence addressed to a fictional brother. Through these fragments, Will Harris attempts to reckon with the past while mourning what never existed.
The text moves, cloud-like, through states of consciousness, beings and geographies, to create a moving portrait of contemporary anxieties around language and the need to communicate. With pronominal shifts, broken dialogisms, and obsessive feedback loops, it reflects on the fictions we tell ourselves, and in our attempts to live up to the demands of others.
From a dimension uncannily like our own, intuited through signs, whispers, and glitches, Brother Poem is shadowed by the loss of what can't be seen. Telling stories of bizarre familial reckonings and difficult relationships, about love and living with others, it is a deeply sensitive coming-of-age poetics.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
"What does it mean to be/ exposed, to speak?" asks Harris (Rendang) in his enjoyable and unpredictable second collection. Across 14 poems and the longer title sequence, Harris's speakers explore a world of communication at once direct and teasingly oblique. A poet of Chinese Indonesian and British descent, Harris uses the conceit of an address to a fictional brother to create a tapestry that weaves family, heritage, and memory, holding abstract imagery "in a shapeless/ flame" while observing "my collection of stones/ kept carefully wrapped/ in a Clarks shoebox." The poems engage with slippery and organic rhetorical play. Yet, while his speakers seem bored by conventional forms of address, Harris can be magical when plainly reckoning with psychological geographies: "London he knew/ it was the other/ country in him/ he feared/ the oak tree's unseen/ roots whose/ tendrils poked/ out mid-speech." Harris's questing consciousness expands against capitalist realities with insistent humanity: "If I hold to any belief/ then what/ I hold to like a favourite leaf/ is in there being /some continuity/ of being. So where are you." Harris delivers an impactful examination of familial and societal relationships through these shape-shifting poems. (Mar.)
