I Think We're Alone Now - Couverture souple

Parry, Abigail

Couverture souple

ISBN 10 : 1780376812 ISBN 13 : 9781780376813

Editeur : Bloodaxe Books Ltd, 2023

Synopsis

Shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize 2023

Shortlisted for English-language Poetry Award (Wales Book of the Year Award 2024)

I Think We’re Alone Now 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.

I Think We’re Alone Now is Abigail Parry's second collection. Her 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.

'Abigail Parry’s I Think We’re Alone Now holds a transformative power as it is filtered through the idea of solitude. Parry is a lyricist who is attentive to the physicality of imagery, word choice and sound. Poems are saturated with images of sonic texture or a ‘whine in the word’. Ever observant Parry forces us to fixate on playful associations with pop music, film and footnotes.' – Paul Muldoon (with Sasha Dugdale and Denise Saul), T.S. Eliot Prize 2023 judges

'Abigail Parry's I Think We’re Alone Now reveals a profound and original metaphysical imagination that examines the enigma of intimacy and its paradoxes. Impressive in its wealth of vocabularies, the poet's vision is razor sharp, with oceanic, but playful depths. This is a multi-layered collection to keep re-reading. No one in contemporary poetry writes like Abigail Parry.' – Pascale Petit, Wales Book of the Year 2024, on behalf of the Judges

'What makes this collection thrilling is Parry's relentless and immense curiosity ... for all its allusiveness and its continual sidelong glances, I Think We're Alone Now is entirely companionable.' - Ian Sansom, The Daily Telegraph

‘The book I’d like to recommend is Abigail Parry’s I Think We’re Alone Now … She can shock you and skin you with her wit, yet her poems feel strangely merciful, cleverly observant, and filled with references to everything from Rilke and Shakespeare to Richie Cordell and Radiohead.’ - Katie Munnik, Wales Arts Review (Books of the Year 2023)

‘Abigail Parry continues to write about anything she turns her eye on with cheerily nonchalant sprezzatura;’ – John Clegg, London Review Bookshop (Books of the Year 2023)

‘These impressively, formally varied poems are precision-assembled, and there is something in each … which tells of meticulous planning, exacting execution and a mesmerising, unrelentingly creative mind.’ – Beth McDonagh, DURA

‘… my bookshelf wouldn’t be complete without Abigail Parry. When poetry is at its best, it tends to change your life. Jinx, Parry’s first collection, certainly changed mine. I am haunted by its poems. Lines and fragments from them have rooted deep in my memory.’ - Nell Prince, The Friday Poem (Bookshelf)

'A collection which looks through, around and beyond words, dissecting their "hinges and joints" in poems which are playfully skilful and intellectually rigorous in equal measure ... This is a collection dripping with the "flair / for the theatre", with words taking centre stage: a love song to language itself.' – Shash Trevett, Poetry Book Society Winter Bulletin 2023, on I Think We’re Alone Now

‘Abigail Parry’s I Think We’re Alone Now is witty and accomplished, revealing the imagination at serious play rather than passively enduring events and feelings. Parry explores the idea of poetry as a game, but one whose outcome is to deliver the player to the chill of mortality … It’s very funny and very dark.’ – Sean O’Brien, The Telegraph

‘Abigail Parry takes a sample of Humanity, mixes it up in her petri dish and then puts on her goggles, casts her eye on it under her microscope. And Aha! Here you go, guys […] If I Think We’re Alone Now wins Wales Book of The Year, it would be a fair reward for such an important body of work.’ – Rhian Elizabeth, Nation.Cymru

'I Think We’re Alone Now takes its play seriously. Parry misdirects as all good magicians do, but not for the sake of gaudy surface effect or for cynical dissection later. Her clever wordings lead to genuine emotional punch.' – Daniel A. Rabuzzi, Tupelo Quarterly

A propos du livre

À propos de l'auteur

Abigail Parry spent several years as a toymaker before completing a PhD on wordplay. Her poems have been set to music, translated into Spanish, Serbian and Japanese, and performed or exhibited in Europe, the Caribbean and the US. She has won a number of prizes and awards for her work, including the Ballymaloe Prize and an Eric Gregory Award. Her first collection, Jinx (Bloodaxe Books, 2018), dealt in trickery, gameplay, masks and costume, and was described as ‘a party in a bag’ (Declan Ryan) and ‘vaudevillian sleaze’ (Stephanie Sy-Quia). The book was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection and the Seamus Heaney Prize for Best First Collection, and named a Book of the Year in The New Statesman (Marina Warner), The Telegraph (Tristram Fane Saunders) and the Morning Star (Kate Wakeling). Her second collection, I Think We’re Alone Now, was published by Bloodaxe Books in November 2023, and was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize 2023.

Détails de l'édition

• Éditeur: Bloodaxe Books Ltd
• Date d'édition: 2023
• Langue: anglais
• ISBN 10: 1780376812
• ISBN 13: 9781780376813
• Reliure: Broché
• Nombre de pages: 80
• Coordonnées du fabricant: non disponible
• Personne responsable: gpsr@libri.de; gpsr@libri.de; ; Friedensallee 273; Hamburg; 22763; Allemagne