Reviews Roundup (July-October 2023): Contemporaneous Brand Strategy Document

I'm grateful for the attention that my fourth book Contemporaneous Brand Strategy Document, published earlier this year, continues to receive, manifested through print and online reviews as well as new invitations to present the work in various settings.

This is a roundup of some reviews that have appeared between its first by Jessica Traynor in The Irish Times on 24 June, and the end of October 2023.

On 3 July 2023, Enzo Minarelli, an Italian poet active in international avant-garde circles since the 1970s and preoccupied with performance and the audiovisual dimensions of poetry, published a review of the book in his personal blog, in Italian. With the help of Minarelli's own translation into English and that of Italian-speaking friends, I was able to deduce that this is an overwhelmingly positive review engaging deeply with the material, its processes and antecedents. "... here the poet undoubtedly has in mind the scene, the sequence or the action or the thought to be exhibited; his main task is to select what to write but above all what to omit in such a way that the reader is forced to stop and reflect in order to find the key to the problem," Minarelli writes, before continuing: "In fact we are faced with the poet's character in full expansion, and the decision of interrupting the narrative chain with continuous turns breaks the reading rhythm." Towards the end there's the declaration that "the impression which persists in the mind of the reader is a sudden, unexpected multisensory stimulation coming from every part that envelopes and involves us, ultimately setting up what is the right, sacrosanct triumph of the independence of the word".

Issue 140 (August 2023) of Poetry Ireland Review carries a review of Contemporaneous Brand Strategy Document by David Toms. In an article titled 'Conversations with Poetry,' he considers it alongside new publications by Ellen Dillon and Aodán McCardle, writing that the book "in many ways picks up where he left off in his previous book, this is no longer entertainment ... with many of the same concerns on display: quotidian language and the language of social media, the internet and its effects - namely the sale of the self through social media." To a significant degree Toms reads it as a comment on the "disconnect between what it is poets actually do (write and sometimes publish poems) and the business of poetry," and describes it as "almost the poetic corollary to JT Welsch's 2020 book, The Selling and Self-regulation of Contemporary Poetry (Anthem Press)." Later, Toms writes that the book "as a whole coheres around the ways in which Makris harvests, plays with and through play upends, makes ridiculous, and pokes fun at much of the worst excesses of performative online behaviour." He concludes that "... it would be easy to be cynical or worse, nostalgic for an age prior to the internet and the possibilities of online communities. Makris avoids this, and instead uses the strange and limited vocabulary of social media to make us wonder ... about alternatives..."

Billy Mills, poet, editor, and formerly literary journalist at The Guardian online, publishes a highly regarded blog called Elliptical Movements in which he regularly reviews books and other publications of poetry with an experimental slant. In a highly perceptive review of Contemporaneous Brand Strategy Document on 26 October 2023, he writes that the book is concerned with "recurring themes and ideas that hover around the notion of the commodification of the self, a world in which the individual is a product, and the product is a brand," and where "the language of these poems is purposefully drained of emotive weight, as flat as the pseudo world it documents, a world in which even the most intimate of relationships are commodified." He ends with expressing "a feeling that the book represents a final statement on a theme. If I’m right, then I’m very interested to see where Makris goes next."

Full reviews and other material related to Contemporaneous Brand Strategy Document are available to view on the book's dedicated page on this website.

Contemporaneous Brand Strategy Document is available to purchase directly from the publisher, Veer2, and elsewhere.