For a few months now I’ve been working as lead editor on Leo Bussi’s debut pamphlet, Life-Sized. I just wanted to say a quick word here about how awesome that’s been. I felt pretty jaded about running a press for a while because I was holistically exhausted and sick of the admin oblivion that is a non-profit tax return. This project has got me back in the game.
Leo’s work has charmed me ever since he read at the SPAM launch of Cocoa and Nothing (listen here) and we bonded over shared appreciation for a certain universally loathed, candy-named song. Editing Life-Sized has been energising because Leo is someone who kind of just comes with a fully formed poetic. And that’s informed by art and conversation and what Sue Tompkins calls ‘muscular sculpture’ and what Oli Hazzard calls ‘gorgeously goofy bathos’. He really has an ear for a line break which is sometimes comic timing and sometimes it’s object erotics and sometimes it’s the trompe l’oeil of the poem’s own jouissance. The poem feeling itself in cereal or nightfall or some kind of membrane.
AI-generated visual absurdism may have diluted the power of surrealism in culture but Leo’s poetry reaffirms the sharp gasp of the paranoiac-critical method. Here we have fused realities and toy scales – ‘Barbie version of Mount Rushmore’– played out in the synaesthetic poetics of a Jeff Koons expanded universe. If this is lyric then it’s also ‘Art-breath’ and everything might be desire but it’s also the agency of the brush and a line might be a gentle brush with erosion or it might be social realism i.e. ‘cucked and living in Britain’. My autocorrect tries to make cucked sucked and I want to tell my computer, you should be so lucky.
We are launching Leo’s book at Good Press on 20th March. It’s at 6:30pm, free and you can just show up.
You can preorder Life-Sized here.
You can also get in touch with SPAM Press if you would like to review the pamphlet!
mariaology 