I Think We’re Alone Now
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
I Think We’re Alone Now is a bold and far-ranging second collection from a fresh and original new voice in British poetry.
This was supposed to be a book about intimacy: what it might look like in solitude, in partnership, and in terms of collective responsibility. Instead, the poems are preoccupied with pop music, etymology, surveillance equipment and cervical examination, church architecture and beetles. Just about anything, in fact, except what intimacy is or looks like.
So this is a book that runs on failure, and also a book about failures: of language to do what we want, of connection to be meaningful or mutual, and of the analytic approach to say anything useful about what we are to one another. Here are abrupt estrangements and errors of translation, frustrations and ellipses, failed investigations. And beetles.
Abigail Parry's first collection, Jinx (Bloodaxe Books, 2018), was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection 2018 and the Seamus Heaney Centre First Collection Poetry Prize 2019.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The ruminative second collection from Parry (Jinx) draws the reader in with offbeat images and erudition that lead to intimate questions and observations. In these mostly one- and two-page poems (as well as two sequences, "Marginal Glosses" and "The Squint"), Parry's inspirations include pop songs, rat brains, the Oxford English Dictionary, and Romeo and Juliet. The book opens with "The brain of the rat in stereotaxic space" ("all jig sawed into place"). The final stanza reflects, "Grateful.../ to have had my time at a kink of neural space/ ...to that where you had yours." "Speculum" quotes the Bible ("through a glass darkly"), then offers, "Hard to know thyself,/ when for years the only way was with a mirror,/ tilted up." Parry finds new meanings in her "cover" of "I Think We're Alone Now," as well as in "It's the lark that sings so out of tune." Romeo's line "I must be gone and live" is here given to a woman seeking freedom from a claustrophobic relationship. In "The Squint," Parry refers to the "partial view" of "The Lepers' Window," which captures both the frustration of limited vision and the impact of moments of clarity. These poems are full of surprises.
