Contemporaneous Brand Strategy Document (Veer Books, 2023)

I'm excited to announce that my new book of poems Contemporaneous Brand Strategy Document is publishing this month with the Veer2 imprint of Veer Books. The book will be launched on Sunday 26 March at 3pm in Books Upstairs in central Dublin.

More details below. Copies will be available to purchase at the launch. The book is also available to order directly from Veer Books, and from other outlets.

About the Book:

Contemporaneous Brand Strategy Document is a cycle of poems composed through a process of remixing automatic writing, direct transcriptions of public speech, and samples from pop culture and social media sources, collectively exploring patterns of digital gesture, (self-)branding, and themes of identity dispersal and anxiety.

The critique of self-absorption, mounted formally in the unpunctuated flow of the poetic voice, is also explored thematically in the transmutation of all forms of movement into opportunities for advantage. In the poem ‘risk’, motion is the archetype of capitalist possibility, but also creates an environment of threat for the expendable subject. By recycling airline instructions the poem first emphasizes the traveller as consumer, but also suggests the ways in which migration itself can be turned to political advantage by elites. Again the materiality of the poem heightens this duality: the “manufacturer’s mask” offers the sustaining oxygen of the market but is out of the reach of its potential wearer.

Once more, neither the experiences of the individual, nor the language used to express them, can be definitively erased: “friend requests anxiety posts horny messages stressed out rants” may appear to be private, but they are in fact memorialized in silicon, merging and multiplying into the uncertain future. Language is thus both expressive of technological inundation and part of its cause. Its accumulation makes reflection more challenging, but offers a rich intertextuality from which these poems of contemporary crisis emerge.

Lucy Collins

from 'Reading Christodoulos Makris'

Irish University Review 49.1

Acknowledgements:

Some of these poems or versions of them have appeared or are forthcoming in Belfield Literary Review, Berfrois, Critical Bastards magazine, Cyphers, Disclaimer magazine, Granta, Irish University Review, Magma, Poetry Wales, and Tripwire: A Journal of Poetry and Poetics. My thanks to all editors involved.

I am thankful to João Guimarães at University College Dublin (UCD), Joanna Walsh and Roy Claire Potter at Arvon Centre, Niamh Campbell at UCD and Museum of Literature Ireland (MoLI), and David Collard through the reading series Leap In The Dark, for invitations to present this work while in development.

Thanks to Lucy Collins for her generous reading of poems from this book in an essay for Irish University Review (Vol 49, No. 1).

Much gratitude to the English Department at Maynooth University and Kildare Arts and Libraries service, in particular to Colin Graham, Oona Frawley and Lucina Russell, for the award of a writing residency in 2018-19, which enabled the early development of this cycle of poems.

Acknowledgement is also due to Fingal Arts Office for the award of a grant towards the completion of this work.

Thanks finally to all at Veer Books and to Aodán McCardle in particular.

About Veer Books / Veer2:

Veer Books comes out of the activities at Birkbeck College’s Contemporary Poetics Research Centre (CPRC) and operates between Birkbeck College, University of London, and the University of Surrey. Veer has been encouraging new work in poetry and poetics since 2003. It has published a range of unconforming writing, including some texts that other publishers might view as experimental. The Veer2 imprint was established more recently and aims to publish poetry that goes beyond boundaries, with an emphasis on non-normative and challenging work.

More about Veer Books here, and about Veer2 here.

Launch Details:

Join us on Sunday 26 March 2023 at 3pm in Books Upstairs (17 D'Olier Street, Dublin 2) for the launch of Contemporaneous Brand Strategy Document.

Including guest readings from Ellen Dillon (author of the Veer2 title Butter Intervention) and Aodán McCardle (Veer Books).

All Welcome!