James Byrne 
Blood / Sugar [EPUB ebook] 

This book is also available as an ebook: buy it from Amazon here.

Byrne's poetry sparkles with wit and irony, and Blood / Sugar is his long-awaited first collection. The editor of a highly-regarded poetry magazine, Byrne maintains great technical proficiency in his structuring of verse, moving effortlessly between the traditional and the innovative to shape poems that brim with lyricism and confidence.

‘James Byrneís second collection, Blood / Sugar is packed, ambitious and absorbing… The comparison that comes to mind is with Christopher Middleton, with whom Byrne shares a restless hunger.’

Sean O'Brien, Poetry Review

‘His poetry is clean, clear and contemporary; it cuts to the bone of the beast every time.’

Keith Richmond, Tribune

‘In Blood Sugar James Byrne's fine poems explore a variety of themes, combining light and shadow, tenderness and wit.’
Wayfarers

‘The way the Peruvian avant-gardist poet Cesar Vallejo described language as being the ëdark nebulae of life that dwells on the turn of a sentence…í can be applied here to the irrefutable poetics of James Byrne. For he has constructed a collection of poems of considerable imaginative pressure, a vice-like poetical ethos… poems of such exactitude and accuracy that it is almost as if Byrne is attempting to replicate and reconstruct his own jaw at the potterís wheel of his imagining… According to Geoffrey Hill, 'difficult poetry is the most democratic, because you are doing your audience the honour of supposing that they are intelligent human beings', and this can most definitely be said of the requirements of the reader facing these innovative poems.’

Paul Stubbs
James Byrne was born in 1977 and is the editor and co-founder of The Wolf poetry magazine. His debut collection, Passages of Time, was published in 2003. In 2008 he won the prestigious Treci Trg poetry prize in Serbia. Since 2006 James has taught Wolf Workshops, which have helped many students with first book and pamphlet publications.

Despre autor

­James Byrne is a poet, editor and translator. His most recent poetry collections are Places You Leave (Arc Publications, 2022), The Caprices (Arc Publications, 2019), Everything Broken Up Dances (Tupelo, 2015) and White Coins (Arc Publications, 2015). Other publications include Blood/Sugar (Arc, 2009), WITHDRAWALS, Soapboxes (both KFS, 2019 and 2014) and Myths of the Savage Tribe (a co-authored text with Sandeep Parmar, Oystercatcher, 2014).
Byrne received an MFA in Poetry from New York University, where he was given a Stein Fellowship ('Extraordinary International Scholar'). He was the Poet in Residence at Clare Hall, University of Cambridge. He currently lives near Liverpool where he is a Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing at Edge Hill University.
Byrne is renowned for his commitment to international poetries and poetics. He is the International Editor for Arc Publications and was editor of The Wolf, which he co-founded, from 2002-2017. In 2012, with ko ko thett, Byrne co-edited Bones Will Crow, the first anthology of contemporary Burmese poetry to be published in English (Arc, 2012). In 2017, with Robert Sheppard, he edited Atlantic Drift, a book of transatlantic poetry and poetics (Arc, EHUP). In 2019, he co-edited, with Shehzar Doja, I am a Rohingya, the first anthology of Rohingya poetry in English. Byrne's poems have been translated into several languages and his Selected Poems (Poemas Escogidos) was published in Spanish in 2019 by Buenos Aires Poetry (translated by Katherine M. Hedeen and Víctor Rodríguez Núñez).
John Kinsella has written that 'James Byrne is a phenomenon and Blood/Sugar is astonishing…He is a complete original.' Ishion Hutchinson wrote of White Coins: 'this is language charged with a tough, sensual contraflow music, vividly alive to inquiry and witness […] an astonishing work, one where virtù and gravitas are in concord with a hermetic passion, one fiercely and beautifully saying the unsayable.'