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.
Tabella dei contenuti
Big Loom • Cuttlefish • Free Will • Four Real Texts • In Anxiety Dreams • After ‘The Quinine Plant’ • Red Balloon • Coffee in October • Commute Songs • Two Clay Figures • The Mower • Innocence • Weather & Address • Blue Bird • Brother Poem• Notes
Circa l’autore
Will Harris is a London-based poem who has published with The Guardian, The New Republic, The London Review of Books, Granta and The Poetry Review among other places. His debut poetry book RENDANG was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize and won the Forward Prize for the Best First Collection. He co-facilitates the Southbank New Poets Collective and works in extra care homes. In 2022, his co-translation (with Delaina Haslam) of Habib Tengour’s Consolation was published. His second book of poems Brother Poem is published by Granta in the UK and by Wesleyan in the US in March 2023.