Search results for ""author ralf webb""

''Remarkable... entertaining... deft... moving... refreshing''Daily Telegraph''Textured literary portraits of the masculine mind and body''Raymond Antrobus, author of The Perseverance''Impeccably well researched and hugely enjoyable''Nicole Flattery, author of Nothing SpecialIn October 1960, James Baldwin and John Cheever spoke on a panel together at San Francisco State College. The troubled state of American society was under discussion, which Baldwin incisively diagnosed as a ''failure of the masculine sensibility''. Strange Relations explores this crisis in mid-century masculinity and the lives and works of four bisexual writers who fought to express and embody alternate possibilities. Building on Walt Whitman''s philosophy of the love between men, Ralf Webb considers the ways in which Tennessee Williams and Carson McCullers, as well as Cheever and Baldwin, resisted i

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A TELEGRAPH AND IRISH TIMES BOOK OF THE YEARLONGLISTED FOR THE POLARI FIRST BOOK PRIZE SHORTLISTED FOR THE FORWARD PRIZE FOR BEST FIRST COLLECTIONSHORTLISTED FOR THE JOHN POLLARD FOUNDATION INTERNATIONAL POETRY PRIZE 'Impressive . . . tender, unflinching' Guardian'This is poetry in the grand tradition of annihiliation by desire. It's what the young are always learning, and the old, if they are wise, never forget' Anne Boyer, author of The Undying'Brilliant . . . heralds the arrival of a frank and vital poetic voice' Sharlene Teo, author of Ponti'Frank and alert . . . an important voice in British poetry' Eley Williams, author of The Liar's Dictionary'Direct and heart-breaking' Alex Dimitrov, author of Love and Other Poems'A rare thing . . . razor-sharp' Julia Copus, author of This Rare Spirit: A Life of Charlotte MewIn Rotten Days in Late Summer, Ralf Webb turns poetry to an examination of the textures of class, youth, adulthood and death in the working communities of the West Country, from mobile home parks, boyish factory workers and saleswomen kept on the road for days at a time, to the yearnings of young love and the complexities of masculinity.Alongside individual poems, three sequences predominate: a series of 'Love Stories', charting a course through the dreams, lies and salt-baked limbs of multiple relationships; 'Diagnostics', which tells the story of the death from cancer of the poet's father; and 'Treetops', a virtuosic long poem weaving together grief and mental health struggles in an attempt to come to terms with the overwhelming data of a life.The world of these poems is close, dangerous, lustrous and difficult: a world in which whole existences are lived in the spin of almost-inescapable fates. In searching for the light within it, this prodigious debut collection announces the arrival of a major new voice in British poetry.

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