Description
Book SynopsisHeather Phillipson is an internationally exhibiting artist and award-winning poet. Instant-flex 718 is her much anticipated first book-length collection. She is already a widely published and anthologised poet. Her Faber New Poets pamphlet appeared in 2009, and her text Not an Essay from Penned in the Margins in 2012. She received substantial publicity as one of the first four writers featured in the Faber New Poets launch, taking part in a national tour supported by extensive TV, radio and newspaper coverage. Heather Phillipson’s poems are a protest against well-stitched seams, an off-loading of intellectual baggage, a shout from the deepish channels of fear. With its cover designed by the artist-poet herself, Instant-flex 718 is an operatics of reactivation. Phillipson has an impertinence and dynamism incomparably her own. Her poems observe the ordinary world stagger.
Trade Review'Instant-flex 718 is an explosive first collection from a poet and artist who thrills and disconcerts in equal measures. Heather Phillipson's poems fuse subterranean erotic landscapes with the complex pleasures of thought. They conduct a weird, addictive verbal electricity that can both jolt and elate. Handle with care: this book is not for those who like their poetry safely earthed' - Mark Ford. 'Phillipson's work is often very funny as it rebounds from one untenable erotic or intellectual position to another...sounding like the love child of Frank O'Hara and Rosemary Tonks' - Sean O'Brien, Guardian. 'Heather Phillipson's poems display heroic bafflement...a humour both quirky and robust' - Andrew McCulloch, Times Literary Supplement.
