In 2022, SPAM Press obtained some funding from the Edwin Morgan Trust’s Second Life Award to run a year-long project titled Brilliant Vibrating Interface: Queering the Post-internet through Poetry and Practice. My co-investigators on the project were Kirsty Dunlop (SPAM’s current editor-in-chief), Alice Hill-Woods and Loll Jung, with Ian Macartney later joining to co-edit our print publication. We squeezed a lot of activity out of that money: community workshops online and in Glasgow, a few reading events, print publication, ‘digital sibling’ and physical installation, podcasts and an online magazine interview with contemporary sonneteers.
Recently, Kirsty and I wrote an epistolary chapter reflecting on the project and its significance in terms of identity, inequality, belonging, poetry scenes, queerness, Glasgow and the labour of love that is small press publishing. In our chapter we talk about the format of the project, Scottish literary scenes from the nineties to present day and the challenges and rewards of moving between print and digital (what we call SPAM’s ‘resolutely hybrid project’). We explore in more depth the poetry and visual art which found a home in our project and proffer up some poetics for how to think about queerness in the context of ‘small nations’ such as Scotland. This takes us everywhere from CAConrad’s bubbles to Legacy Russell’s glitch feminism to Edwin Morgan’s sumptuous strawberries.
The chapter is out now as part of an anthology, Queer in a Wee Place: Small Nations, Sexuality & Scotland. To quote from the publisher’s website, the book ‘explores identity, inequality and belonging in animated conversations about how queerness moves through place – and how place, in turn, shapes queer lives’. Queer in a Wee Place contains chapters written by researchers of many disciplines and practices – from sociologists to poets – on subjects ranging from the utopic gaze on queer film to legacy and queer elders, disabled queer student experiences of higher education, Scotland’s menstrual landscape, hate crime and queer provincialisms.
The book is available in paperback form for what is a very reasonable price (for an academic book!) from Bloomsbury. You can ask your library to order it in for you 🙂
You can also read it for free via Bloomsbury’s Open Access service here.
Our archive of materials relating to Brilliant Vibrating Interface, including workshop handouts, podcast episodes, interviews and the online exhibition (what we called a ‘Digital Sibling’) can all be found at http://www.spamzine.co.uk and on the EMT website.
We started Away from Keyboard almost a year ago to the day. Despite hosting readings for a decade, SPAM had never previously run a regular night and we’d been talking about it for years since things started reopening after god knows how many lockdowns we had in Glasgow. After a hefty era spent solely ‘at keyboard’ it was time to get poets in a room again. What I like about a bimonthly series is it’s flexible enough to work around poets who might be in town anyway, there’s time for curation and building a kind of ‘snowball sampling’ effect of poets to invite via who shows up and who recommends who. The lineups are usually about five or six readers reading for 10-15 minutes each, which catches the sweet spot between a big, rapid-fire performance showcase and more sustained readings. While sometimes they can be really fun and a great way to get exposed to a wide range of writing, I’ve always struggled with big group readings because any potential associations, threads and lineages between the poets get lost in overdrive. I tune out. When you’ve got just five minutes on-stage, poets tend to read a particular kind of snappy and ‘polished’ poem and there isn’t room for the kind of variation and trajectory that comes from building a proper ‘set’. 10-15 minutes also leaves room to try out new work too.
Our ninth AFK took place last Thursday at our old haunt, the Peckham Pelican. Huge gratitude to them especially Stu who helped us lock in the date. Let me just say how hard it is to book venues for poetry. Can someone make a big database of suitable venues please? The big problem in Glasgow is finding a space that is affordable, accessible and relatively stable. Everyone remotely in the Glasgow orbital will know about the decimation of our arts spaces in recent months (CCA and Listen Gallery have just closed). In London, the big problem seems to be finding a venue that won’t require a whopping minimum bar spend way out the league of our skint poetry community. Alas alas. Still, every bar we’ve worked with we’ve worked with because of a poet working at that bar. Keep it in the family. I love the Pelican and its happy hour negronis (‘Peli-gronis’), the friendly bar staff, big space, wonky bookshelf. I love how in London there is almost always transport home after dark, whereas in Glasgow you have to negotiate ride-shares on Ubers (an option newly available to me now I caved and finally moved south) or try and line up two buses, one of which is guaranteed to not show up, leaving you stranded in a vortex of raging seagulls and vape shops (‘town’), or in the industrial hinterlands of Tradeston. Online, I’ve seen recent movement in campaigning for better transport in Glasgow and I hope something comes of it. The amount of times I have walked 1.5 hours home after midnight…
Before the reading, Maya, Mau, Kirsty and I got food at Peckham Market. Eating before a poetry reading is something I only learned how to do a few years ago and it makes a difference. No more blinding headaches! No more yearning to leave early! No more one drink too many! I recommend it. We had our book table set up in a jiffy cuz we’re getting really pro at that now. We had so many books it spilled out onto a bench and the nearby countertop. We thought there wasn’t much SPAM stock left but a surprise abundance of Thirteen Morisettes and Cocoa and Nothings showed up, plus some bonus books to sell from the readers. The AFK#9 zines sold out so quickly I didn’t even get a copy to take home! One of the things I enjoy about book-tabling is talking to people who come by to peruse. If you are a poet never be shy about introducing yourself at these things…we live in Glasgow and it helps to keep us in the wider loop 🙂
First up was Phoebe Eccles, who surely won outfit of the evening with her yeti boots, kilt and crocheted bell-sleeve combo, topped off with an enviably chic pixie cut. Eccles’ poetry did some Lynchian fish-catching, delivered timely political barbs, ran its hands through Milton’s silky hair and popped out some tulpa spoilers from Twin Peaks: The Return. I wrote down ‘The independent life of meat’ and a dream poem in which a child in a cave headbutts stalactites (or was it stalagmites?). Eccles’ work is playful and sharp, with a discursive feel to it that is able to weave in urgent recent events to the pulse of cultural analysis. The poetry had a similar to texture to some of David Lynch’s CGI creations in The Return: sort of glistening and disturbing, meat-like, surely not quite of this world but only because they are also so…tulpa? Virtual-material?
Next was Dora Maludi, who began with ‘Fear of dog’: a stunning, swerving poem about ownership, being on the leash, love, thread, fear, birth. I wrote down ‘failure as an embroidered emblem’, ‘it is not normal to lick weaponry’, ‘the anatomy was spectral and well-meaning’, ‘woof like you mean it’. It’s a good ethic to howl like you mean it. What does that look like in a poem? It’s almost like Maludi took the skeins of that howl – the shimmering microscopic particle matter – as a skyward formation swooping upwards and elsewhere in her reading. She also read from a ‘dental memoir’ which among other things describes menstruating all over the Ed Atkins retrospective at the Tate. I wrote down ‘microplastic and dandy’. I think microplastics came up in a couple of readings. Talking of skeins, I told everyone about how last time I was at the dentist the radio was playing ‘Geese’ and how much that upset me because I love Geese and this means a lot to me because for a long time friends described me as ‘gooseblind’ because I couldn’t recognise a goose from a lineup of idk ducks, and now that I knew what geese looked like and in fact loved the band Geese, I couldn’t have these neurological connections ruined by the everyday pain of a scale and polish. My dumb segue comment did not have room to explain that context so there it is.
JD Howse followed, dressed all in black to match the SPAM editrixes, delivering a ghost story followed by a suite of new sonnets written, I found out later, in the span of a week. The ghost story took me somewhere, a kind of crumbling maybe seaside place — the geographical admixture of Robyn Skyrme and Ann Quin. A hotel crumbles over a promenade, there’s a fire pit, twigs. I wrote: ‘the sky pulled around us like bedsheets’ and imagined this wholeheartedly, being swaddled or suffocated in a shapeshifting quilt of cloud. ‘Cinders in the wind…smouldering as my body dissipates with yours’. The sonnets featured foxes, O’Hara being read in the rose garden (instigating personal flashback to reading Stephen Rodefer in the Berkeley Rose Garden — more poetry must be read in rose gardens), ‘morning attempts to ontologise what remains’, ‘orange tulips, almost neon, brought ot my door’. The images are vividly memorable, the twisting arguments of the sonnet form deployed to bathos and humour amongst sincerity, ‘I fell in love with you because / I thought it would be funny’. Ah how slant-assonance makes a mockery of love’s ass!
After the break, Poppy Cockburn took to the stage. We’d had a chat about our love for a little lace or gauze on an otherwise plain shirt and how to source the garment of your dreams via pursuit and digital fluking. Cockburn is masterful at grabbing the dynamics of poem-as-poem and holding it to the light like a prism scattering wit. She understands how to tap into polydimensional performance resonance which maybe comes from her prowess as both poet and PR strategist. Sometimes you laugh and sometimes you feel like here’s a side to existence thrown into relief, something you didn’t know you needed to see. At the start of the reading, poor Poppy had to compete with Joni Mitchell who was still playing over the bar’s PA. Good-naturedly she hummed along until the staff turned down Joni. She read from her debut collection, Naked Oyster, which was put out by If A Leaf Falls last year. On the cover, a smudged Grecian-cum-vaporwave head looks plaintively down as it floats above textural shrinkwrap. This ‘look’ is a good capture of affect and I started to think maybe they need to replace the heads of the angels in Crystal Palace Park. Cockburn’s pithy works are reminiscent of Chelsey Minnis, Bunny Rodgers, Maria Hardin and Nadia de Vries, but she has this distinctively English streak of deadpan that sets it apart. Her performance explored humility, haplessness in love, sirens, wash cycles, driving, secrecy, words as ‘silks on a slow cycle’, bad men, lost feelings. I wrote down ‘POETRY IS HUMILIATING AND THERE IS NO GETTING AWAY FROM IT’ (all-caps possibly mine), ‘music journalists are full of shimmer’ and ‘I don’t have an opinion / I’m just an ambient orb’ which felt like a gurlesque take on the ‘geometrical turn’ I’m seeing everywhere after years of formless oozing. Pretty sure shape-loving Ian Macartney had an orb-themed house party once. You’ll have to ask him about it.
Our penultimate reader was Irish writer Francis Jones, who read from their Veer2 pamphlet Storm Drain. The opening repetitions reminded me of poetic markov chaining. A throwback to Howse’s twigs, we had ‘I scrub myself with cream with bits of bark in it’, how face-scrubbing makes you late for work. A spiderweb ‘like a pube in my teeth / but my own body’. Amidst this becoming-animal body horror there was an ‘unbelievable hibiscus’ and ‘major airways act[ing] furious’, ‘a grotesque stateliness’. Jones’ mentioning of the grotesque cascaded the next day into a conversation with two other poets, Katy Lewis Hood and Jared Stanley, about who or what the current grotesque poets are. I was thinking about that Dean Kissick article ‘The Vulgar Image’ which my south side reading group (affectionately titled Communal Nude) read in playful dialogue with Robert Glück’s inimitable Margery Kempe, thinking about iconography and desire and morphology, slop and narrative, collage and seam/i/less/ness. Hit me up if you have suggestions as to who are the new grotesque poets. Interestingly, grotesque comes from the Italian grottesca from opera or pittura grottesca meaning work resembling that found in a grotto. We had this conversation about the grotesque in Peltz Gallery while looking at Melanie Smith’s Tixinda, a Snail’s Purple and meditating on the gorgeousness and grossness of purple, its excess, as it is extracted from the sea snail Plicopurpura pansa. It was warm and kind of grotto-like in the gallery. Katy told me they discovered recently that the snail’s gel people are putting in beauty products is not extracted from sexually exciting the snail but in fact putting them into a state of panic. I started thinking about our cultural fetish for glass skin and the ecopoethic implications of putting the substance of another species’ panic attack on your face everyday. The last thing I wrote down during Jones’ reading was ‘love transports in moisture’.
Talking of corporeal serums, William Aghoghobe topped off the night with wax and ‘the extreme extent of human secretions’ revealed in an autobiographical piece about his experience working in a university library. Aghoghobe is a very atmospheric writer and a kind of sculptor of images that sometimes coagulate and sometimes melt into motion. He read about doppelgangers, spores, frames within frames, dirt, the Walthamstow Marshes and marshy doubling of object pronouns, ‘I am only as much as my garments’. What does it mean to be a figure, like actually? All this talk of materiality made it very hard to resist pulling out the stuffing in the beat-up ‘green room’ sofas and somehow become-sofa myself but I did resist by writing down words instead. We had tales from the level 7 annex, tales from fire alarms, ‘mountains of keys’, plastics, being ‘a spectacle worker’ and dealing with an unfortunate ‘ghost-shitter’. Aghoghobe reads with bags of charm and a surrealism befitting the grotesquerie of the modern everyday.
And so concludes my roundup of AFK#9! Our next reading will take place in Glasgow on the 9th March, with lineup soon to be announced. Thanks to everyone who came down to the Pelican! Other dates for your diary are:
20th March – Kirsty Dunlop’s book launch for Centrefolding at Mount Florida Books (in conversation with Ian Macartney)
27th March – Kirsty Dunlop’s book launch for Centrefolding at Argonaut Books (in conversation with me + performance from Kevin Leomo)
30th April – Launch of Iphgenia Baal’s new SPAM book at Peckham Pelican (details tbc)
27th May – SPAM 10-year anniversary party at The Old Queens Head on Essex Road, London (details tbc)
Also stay tuned for news of SPAM’s Glasgow anniversary party!
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.
SPAM Plaza is reopening submissions for Digital Dreamland.
Ever had déjà vu, not knowing if something happened IRL, online or in your dreams? As screentime and sleep time increasingly clock similar hours of the day, we’re turning our attention to the acute relationship between dreams and the internet.
We invite critical work inspired by, but not limited to, any of the following topics:
☁︎ sleep procrastination and social media
☁︎ cloud hoarding
☁︎ the return of the (digital) repressed
☁︎ the memetic unconscious
☁︎ distraction as dream economy
☁︎ ghosting (and the metaphysics of digital presence)
☁︎ sleep texting
☁︎ hyperreal environments & nonspaces as dreamscapes
☁︎ online dream journaling communities
☁︎ targeted ads as unconscious desires
☁︎ chaos edits as dream realism
☁︎ artificial intelligence and dreaming
☁︎ interactive & lucid dreaming
☁︎ digitally-induced parasomnias
☁︎ dream imaginaries and political im/possibility
☁︎ neural net neurosis
☁︎ image spam and cyber garbage as psychic discharge
☁︎ oceanic feeling online
☁︎ dreams in augmented and virtual realities
☁︎ video game realities and dream framing
☁︎ online shopping and astral projection
☁︎ cognitive timelapse and digital intimacies
☁︎ corecore and collaging the cultural unconscious
☁︎ dream scanning as the next cyber frontier
☁︎ avatars, dreams and shadow selves
☁︎ (rip) twitter dream sharing
☁︎ movie and/or fictional representations of dreams and the internet
☁︎ typographic parapraxis (poetics of the typo as freudian slip)
For more inspiration, read the inaugural editorial for this series written by Maisie Florence Post. We always love to see work which engages these themes specifically in relation to poetry, but are open to work that touches on any aspect of texts, media and internet culture.
Submission guidelines:
We will be open for submissions between 15th January and 12th March 2025.
All submissions should be sent to spamzine.editors@gmail.com with subject line SUBMISSION: DIGITAL DREAMLAND.
Please add a brief note to your email explaining how your work fits into our theme.
We aim to respond to all submissions within four weeks and some people will hear back before the submission window closes as we will be publishing pieces on a rolling basis throughout 2025.
This is an open call for critical work. While we appreciate the line between creative and critical can be fluid, we are looking for work that fits overall a more critical angle.
Unfortunately neither the editors or contributors of this series will receive remuneration. Copyright remains with the author.
We don’t have capacity to give feedback on unsuccessful submissions and the editors’ decision remains final.
Please send submissions that are previously unpublished.
You can submit up to TWO pieces in any of the following categories:
Flash essays – 400-1000 words
Full essays – 1000-2500 words
Theory fictions – up to 2000 words
Verse essays – up to 100 lines (we have very limited formatting options however, so please get in touch if you’re not sure your work will be suitable)
Visual essays (photography, memes, illustrations etc – max limit of 15 images)
Audio or video essays (with text transcript provided – you must already have the link hosted elsewhere rather than send it as a file – we need to be able to embed it via a link)
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You can read the SPAM Plaza archive for free to get a feel for the stuff we like to publish.
Over the past few months I’ve had the pleasure of working with two excellent poets, Jack Young and Karólína Rós Ólafsdóttir, on bringing to life their pamphlets in the country garden /the end of england and All in Animal Time. It’s been a fair few months since SPAM published anything physical (our most recent print publication was Cocoa and Nothing back in February) and coordinating everything for season 7 reminded me why I love doing this in the first place. There is something magical and alchemical that happens in the process of getting something from email to book in a series of whirlwind zoom(ies) and frantic whatsapps and editorial ping pong and delicious in-depth reading. I love figuring out solutions to a design problem, shunting things around, letting things bleed into the edges or splash into place, phone calls about word choice and line breaks. Generous margins and snaky wee texts / embarking upon font quests.
We got to know our authors, who are based in Bristol and Iceland, variously over the pandemic through Zoom workshops and the great poetry boulevard that is gmail. You can read one of Jack’s poems in SPAM005 and one of Karó’s in SPAM004. The SPAM editors are big fans of their work and we were delighted that both authors had pamphlets that kind of grew out of the poems in the magazine. This season has a lil rainbow-shrouded eco flavour: poems of the anthropocene everyday, poems of queer pastoral, poems in animal time (as per David Berman’s advice). J&K are poets with a real interest in the scholarly work of poetry as much as the playful. These are really thoughtful works which traverse everything from decolonising botany to Commander Keen, the dietary needs of black holes and the sonnets of rats and punctuation marks. Ugh I really love them! Thinking about these pamphlets is like coming up on coffee with sunlight pouring through the morning and having adequate sleep and remembering why the little things really fucking matter. It’s like the libido of the knotweed exerting pressure to break concrete and escape the walled garden which is like beautiful open source software. I am so lucky to have worked with these poets and also to have collabed with my co-editors Mau Baiocco, Kirsty Dunlop and Ian Macartney in bringing them to fruition. Long live SPAM!
Coordinating this pamphlet series also reminded me that publishing is an act of worldbuilding, brick by paper brick, pixel by pixel. It’s like: how do we give birth constantly to the word-pearls of what you wanted by accident of so many factors to have an idea for ~ ~ it’s like……a gift, a life-changing conversation, a journal entry for the language of flowers, a frolic through girl city’s sugar cubes and the delicious lumpencoal of the poem. Stop to admire the ‘four-star review sycamore’ (KRO) while you’re at it.
We worked with two v talented artists, Maura Sappilo and Sam Williams on cover design. Thank you Jack and Maura!!!
If you’re in Glasgow, please come along to our launch on the 10th November, where we’ll also have a reading from Edinburgh poet Murid L. Keshtmand and there will be many a pamphlet on sale and a lil wine & snack to be had.
PEOPLE OF THE PRESS! If you’d like to review the book, interview one of the authors, have them on your podcast or stock copies of the pamphlets in your store, please email spamzine.editors@gmail.com.
You can preorder the books at inflation-resistant prices => spamzine.co.uk/shop.
You can watch two Instagram live sessions with Jack and Karó here, where we talk about the thinking behind the pamphlets, inspirations and the craft of writing.
It’s been a while since we recorded an episode of Lunch Club over at SPAM HQ, but I was really excited to join Jac Common and Ian Macartney in the studio to discuss the 2020 spamphlet Bad Moon by Samantha Walton.
Galina Rymbu, Life in Space (New York: Ugly Duckling Presse, 2020, trans. Joan Brooks).
William Blake, Visions of the Daughters of Albion (1793) public domain.
William Shakespeare, The Tempest, ii.I
Aiskhylos, Agamemnon in An Oresteia (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, trans. Anne Carson)
Derek Jarman, Modern Nature (London: Vintage, 1992).
Daisy Hildyard, The Second Body (London: Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2017).
Fred Carter (2022) ‘`Crude Oil Shaping Forms of Writing`: Galina Rymbu’s Life in Space, Ecoes, 4, 56-65.
Esther Leslie, Fog, Froth and Foam: Insubstantial Matters in Substantive Atmospheres in Electric Brine (Berlin: Archive Books, 2021, ed. Jennifer Teets).
Sophie Lewis (2017) ‘Amniotechnics’, The New Enquiry, link
Max Liboiron, Pollution is Colonialism (New York, London: Duke University Press, 2021).
Stacey Alaimo, Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the Material Self (Bloomington: Indiana University Press).
July was such a busy month but one of its delights was working on the design for this book, With the Boys by fred spoliar. I’ve been so buzzed about upcoming SPAM releases (more to be announced soon) and what better way to kick off our 2021 roster than with this vivid purgatorial rush of a book. The cover design is a collage layering of illustrations, colour effects and old woodcuts (including those vomiting sun battle scenes which divide the book into sections and contribute to the faux ye olde vibe) which gesture to the book’s primal scene (imo): the confrontation with the boy laying down >insert meme here: “you winning son??”< as the OG basis for all the boys, are we for or against them, might we let them rest? As fred reminded me at a recent reading in Crystal Palace Park, “masculinity is no joke maria” and this book explores how the cascades of climate crisis, austerity, property relations, ‘fake news’, ongoing colonialism, racial capitalism, transphobia and pandemic are all bundled up in the ancient, ever-mutating violence of patriarchy. The demands the boys place on us and those placed on the boys, we understand them in a camaraderie of the here-and-now that is our future ancestral citation, cracking a cold one for the world that is burning ice and going online. With the Boys is a book of post-internet poetry, an adventure story, a lyric dalliance with historical epic in synchronic form. It’s a book that refuses linear models of transition, progress and accumulation, and ideas of history as a totality; a book that finds residues of love and care among masculinity’s ‘trashfire’ (in Al Anderson’s words). I want to think of it partly in the realm of Keats’ ‘negative capability’, the idea of lyric identification as doubt, the pluralism of the boys as a quivering flame or rippling plasma, capable of being more than what essentialist gender ideology would deem the boys. Your ‘brain on elegy’, your ‘stupid hurt’, your ‘buzzcut chorus’ and ‘apple products’ – humming, ubiquitous, they belong to all of us, in a way.
Process sketches for the book cover.
There is something about a (re)birth in this book; fred has called it ‘a purgation’. Something been set on fire or released, the way of touching abysses of sleepless thinking and facing up, fuck, to the impossibilities of work and not-work. To morph, mourn, join together, be commoning or calling out, be warm or hard or wet or sore, be there and gone. One thing that resounds is the refrain, the sonorous sense (something Verity Spott commented on at our recent launch, and something I love about Verity’s work also) of lyric in the book as a musical sprawl, fever, affirmation. For me, this is totally synaesthetic and electric, ‘a crucial magenta song’ and ‘like aleatory dance departing’ in the sacred gatherings of the rats — the animals that survived 2020 (their epic and terrible year) and will go on thriving beyond us. Like, we are not supposed to be here. Like, we crawl over the language that won’t want to hold us and we throw out this ask. Are we to be comrades? Sometimes you read fiery poetry that enflames and hisses (kisses) and makes you want to attend the protest, make the call, offer your body to the line (the book’s closing poem, ‘kludge time‘, was written in response to the recent Kenmure Street anti-raid action), and With the Boys summons this fire, but also sings in the muscly erotics of its cinders. These cinders which catch in the breath before and after the poem, which can’t be reduced to this or that reading; which burn with occasional satire, twinge and catch of meaning.
You want to say the boys are a folk knowledge, they are song, they are the startup code that ceaselessly reboots until lyric glitches in ‘fertile crevices’. They are a compost, the dregs of bad schooling, an institution of historical impotence, a gesture of care and play (‘I push you on the swings’), an orientation towards the vibe, a grammar of suspension ‘stopping by the interchange‘, a big fucking ‘nova‘ that hopes to find you well. Hi, hello, hi. *WAVE*. Everyone in some sense knows them. They are obviously so much more. I’m this hush-breath away from saying the boys are a hyperobject. You decide. The boys are shoegaze distortion all over capital’s weeping, the road less travelled, dazzling and pregnant and ‘wilding’. They will do your makeup and hum the ‘harmonic law to / love to leave to love’ — bright pink and chartreuse. You better have a go at them.
With the Boys is available for £8 from SPAM Press.You can get in touch with the editors for review copies or to stock in your bookstore at spamzine.editors[at]gmail.com.
mariaology 