EPIZOOTICS #2 1

EPIZOOTICS! Issue 2

Edited by
Caitlin Stobie
Harrison Sullivan
Matthew Carbery
Peter Adkins

Published August 2017

https://epizooticszine.wordpress.com/

Cover Art: ‘rendered2’ by Bethan Hughes

‘Hollow Lifefield’, ‘Fathomsuns’, and ‘The Poles’ are printed courtesy of

Suhrkamp Verlag.

‘Specific Inherited Mutations’ was previously published in Eyewear.

All rights reserved. This journal is protected by copyright. The copyright

© remains with the named author. The moral right of the journal’s
contributors have been asserted. No part of this publication may be
reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form
without prior permission.
Contents
6 Editorial

CREATIVE

9 ‘Strangled Ramble’ and ‘A Grave Matter’ — Ben Marsh

Allen

11 ‘Depth Gauge’, ‘OMNIS’ and ‘Zynaps’ — Bill Bulloch

14 ‘VERNIX CASEOSA’ — Bryn Tales

15 ‘The Acceleration of a Horse on a Plane’ and ‘Nests XX-

XXIII’ — Calum Hazell

20 ‘Pine Needle Poem (After David Miller, 2010)’ — Camilla

Nelson

21 ‘Three Celan Translations’ — Charles Eager

23 ‘Tantalus Beaker’, ‘The Ocean Biome : Keepsake & Egress’

and ‘The Lung : Heartbreak’ — Christopher Cokinos

29 ‘(1)’, ‘(2)’, ‘Tombstone’ and ‘What Space

Between Us’ — David Rushmer

33 ‘Examination at the Faculty

of Medicine, 1901’, ‘Blouet, 0.61x0.49m.’, ‘Medical
Inspection, 0.83x0.61m’, ‘Dog-Cart, 0.27x0.35m.’ and ‘Alone,
1896’, — Dennis Andrew S. Aguinaldo

38 ‘isle of mull, 2016’ — Dominic O’Key

39 ‘Untitled Collaboration’ — Grizel Luttman-Johnson

40 ‘Osculation’ and ‘The Sunbather’ — Heather J
Macpherson

42 ‘The Eucalyptus Tree (Amic Deck, Wits

University)’ — Kirby Manià

44 ‘Field Recordings (2016)’ — Matthew Carbery

49 ‘shoaling’ — Natalie Joelle

52 ‘Blot: A Narrative’ — Peter Adkins

60 ‘Specific Inherited Mutations’ — Rachel Gippetti

61 ‘LUCID’ — Skye McDade-Burn

69 ‘Sepia Night’, ‘Fenollosa Manuscript’ and ‘Acclaimed Ashes’

—Sneha Subramanian Kanta

72 ‘An Unsettling Effect’, ‘Expanding the

Search Area’, ‘An Expert in the Field’, ‘An Underwater Shot’,
‘Tide Tables’ — Steve Spence

78 Canalchemy #2 — Steve Hitchins

80 ‘Ten Tiny Poems (30 January 2016)’,

‘Decompression’, — Stuart Ross

83 ‘Ringwood’ — Tom Betteridge

89 ‘Erotica’ — Tom Snarsky

90 ‘The Sons Of Hell’ — William Telford

 CRITICAL

95 ‘Plasticising the Biogea’ — Eline Tabak

REVIEWS

110 Roy Fisher’s Slakki: New & Neglected Poems — Oliver Webb

112 Sam Solnick’s Poetry and the

Anthropocene: Ecology, biology and technology in
contemporary British and Irish poetry — Harrison Sullivan

115 Dylan Trigg’s Topophobia: A

Phenomenology of Anxiety — Matthew Carbery

118 Ian Duhig’s The Blind Road Maker — Steve Spence

121 Biographical Notes

5
Editorial
Hello and welcome to the second issue of EPIZOOTICS! On behalf of
the editorial team -- Caitlin, Harrison, Matthew and Peter -- we hope
you will find plenty to enjoy in the mixture of poetry, prose, essays and
reviews that comprise our sophomore outing.

Eclecticism is a guiding principle here at the zine and we believe that

the diversity of voices, subject matter, styles and forms will stand
testament to that. There is, nonetheless, a certain set of preoccupations
that, either implicitly or explicitly, might be seen to unify the various
texts and images published in the following pages. What does it mean to
write, or indeed perform any creative endeavour, under the sign of the
Anthropocene? How is the figure of the human currently undergoing
revision? What are the implication for our relation with other species
and, indeed, the idea of species itself?

The urgency of such questions seems daily more apparent. With the
passing of Earth Overshoot Day on the 2nd August, the moveable annual
date that marks when our consumption of natural resources outweighs
their renewability, and the warmest June on record here in UK, the
realities of the Anthropocene are already making themselves felt. These
realities are both in need of and further provoke philosophical inquiry
and artistic expression. They invite critical resistance against received
wisdom and established consensus. Such events and thresholds insist
that we no longer take the figure of the human for granted, but also that
we don’t give up the political. They call for a posthumanist practice that
resists unknotting itself in the hope of resolution, or other such niceties.

Many of the works in this issue speak to the anxieties surrounding

these crises. In Dennis Aguinaldo’s poetry the limits of conservativism,
conservationism, and nationalism are neatly tested by “coolly dipping
passports in water.” Writing from South Africa, Kirby Manià considers
the consequences of crossing boundaries in radical times, while Charles
Eager’s three new translations of Paul Celan speak of the ‘greyblack
waste’ of the the twentieth century. That’s not to suggest the offerings
here are of one tone. As well as negation and uncertainty, there is
also affirmation and, even, laughter in the works that follow. From
William Telford’s comic tale of death-at-sea to Eline Tabak’s essay

6
on how (following Michel Serres) we might plasticise the concept of
the Anthropocene and Peter Adkins’s darkly humorous narrative, a
necessary irreverence and iconoclasm is also at work here.

We’re also pleased to include a broader selection of reviews in our second

issue. Oliver Perrott-Webb offers a timely review of Slakki the new poetry
collection from Roy Fisher, who sadly died in March, while Harrison
Sullivan assesses one of several new monographs re-examining poetics
in the light of climate change. We also have reviews of new works in
poetry and philosophy from Matthew Carbery and Steve Spence. In sum,
we hope that you will find much here to enjoy.

The Editorial Team

7
 CREATIVE

8
‘STRANGLED RAMBLE’ — Ben Marsh-Allen
The scuttling sun runs across flayed fields; its light torching the
paper country lanes. Animal heart. Stalk the hedgerows – clogged
and cluttered with the departed presents of man. Walk with us,
trampling tarmac, our bodies twisting alongside barbed wire
branches until we stumble across a fridge, set freon the verge of
forever. Beyond us are the fly tipping signs that you’ll never be
court. Instead, you should lie with your tattered mattress mouth
forced to eat fast consume hurry all that’s heaped in polystyrene
dreams. Sleep out here hung roped above the dark rainbow pools
that course through tyre torn mud.

The world is your waste basket. Thrown from wound windows

into the flinching face of mother what the fuck have we done only
suckled you dry these teetering withered rotten crops – witnesses
stand weeping – a yellow army that’s dodged the sickle…

Tread picturing starvation, warehouses groaning with bowels of

surplus fruit.

Turn and stride back to the fenced fringes of civilisation complete

with its chocolate box cottages. Our greed does not meet our
needs. Proposed construction is being carved out of controlled
destruction, the screaming machinery wielding diesel arms that
excavate with heavy fists through layers of your skin. Together we
use the whip fashioned from the bones we find within.

9
‘A GRAVE MATTER’ — Ben Marsh-Allen
No, death really is. It boils down into our final directive, how best
to recycle our singing flesh. Whether it is nobler in the mind to
fall, wrapped in a teardrop cage onto the ocean’s chest or stack
ourselves to be overcooked, in furnished gold for your children to
keep. In reality we’re all running around as vehicles propelled by all
that fine dining upon the dying, the bodyworks fossil fuelled, our
consumption a stately lights out luncheon.

A parlour promise, with a menu of remembrance presented by

suited hands: promession lets you rest in pieces, resomation leaves
you a final solution.

(these specials are currently off)

However, the vegetarian option will make sure you get your
cardboard greens. They are all novel forms. What better way than
to have our tragedies engraved – I mean who isn’t hungry for that –
look at the queues of people clutching their scrolls of doppelgänger
life pinched into byte sized chunks lining up out the door.

Please be seated.

Mother wants to be buried and will most likely dine alone.

Grandmother collects the orders of service (something to
remember hymns by) and worries who will wash the debris away
from her plated stone and could somebody please change the
boneyard flowers? Father knows the business so he’s already pre-
ordered. Now finished he sits back in morbid obesity, picks the
lichen from his teeth and begins his last supper obituary, praising
the chef with formaldehyde breath and mentions, with a wormy
tongue, how he had to shelve those who had failed to urn their
molten sleep, whole humans left dissolved in dust.

He ventilates that I rushed my food. I had wanted to get out early

but now I have reasons to stay. For me it’s just desserts resting
in the echoing clamour of feet over head – I’ll find my post-feast
comfort stretched out underneath our perfect lawn.

10
‘Depth Gauge’ — Bill Bulloch

11
‘OMNIS’ — Bill Bulloch

12
‘Zynaps’ — Bill Bulloch

13
‘VERNIX CASEOSA’ — Bryn J Tales
Hold your breath for as long as you can in the bath:
bubbles iridescent, curve light as across mussel shell
until silver, tight-chested, you are burst
into the grease of a varnishing birth

in new, obliging shallows: shellfish, crab, aquatic plants

for the biped who stands, scans
and for the first time sees;
brain flushed with violets of iodine

Our environment amends our physiology:

the ear canal that latches onto coolnesses of tide,
responds in bone- petal-skins of first ice-
until a diver’s ear to dive with, to bear the pressurised

intact like seal pups in harbour congregation

whose same vernix caseosa brings us,
through our history of exposures and starvations,
to the epoch’s narrative in waveshapes

14
‘The Acceleration of a Horse on a Plane’ — Callum Hazell

15
‘THE NESTS XX-XXIII’ — Callum Hazell
Stayed fossil /to/
HYPERIMPOSITION to irreduced rope

[here creatureliness inspirit

&
w/out [here

creatureliness hesitates against

/that/ marrow had furred

that bandages had

most· these [anechoic]

places· are· blind

ang

16
hung x71 pcs. cortex
bulb &
stayed.percussive.suite

whichthat
fold /in/
total looseleaved
field

/dependence is/
the carefully static field
to accord

/the/
carefully evacuated
human head and
fold

between dilated
ground

17
 the
silence-manifold
exceed
singularly/drawn/document
by
abject

but
to have held hands
against

w/ generally electric
each morning
a simple production
collude
their estrangements

the monument
each ______________ generally w/
neatblue smoke
magnetism and some hrs.

18
where
from w / out
little.soft.craft

the 1
the vastest specular
procedure to 1
perfectly collapsed cell
of surface.origins

be installed
unfelt over magnitude

a young that is “urinated

plasma
marble
lotion allowance
and zones forbade of

19
‘pine needle poem (after David Miller)’
— Camilla Nelson

20
‘Three Celan Translations’ — Charles Eager

We who were Charles’s five translations now are three.

I.

Hollow lifefield. In the windcatch

the vain-
blown lung
blooms. A handful,
sleepcorn,
ways out the truth-
stammered mouth
hereout to the snow-
speakings.

II.

Fathomsuns
over the greyblack waste.
A tree-
heigh thought
grasps in the lighttone: there are
still songs to sing overleaf
of mankind.

III.

‘And I will go to bed at noon.’ — Fool, King Lear

The poles
are in us,
unovercomeable
in waking.
We sleep across, before the gate
of expience,

© Suhrkamp Verlag 2017 21

 I lose you to you, that
is my snowconsolement,

say, that Jerusalem is,

say’t, as were I this,

your white,
as were you
mein,

as could we without us we be,

I leaf you over, for ever,

you pray, you to-bed

us free.

22 © Suhrkamp Verlag 2017

‘Tantalus Beaker’ — Christopher Cokinos
Everything has a mouth for revelation.

According to the Computational Story Lab,

there are only six emotional arcs in literature.

No wonder it’s a racket. Ongoing

rise or ongoing fall, it is, without explanation,

Thursday. So it’s quiet. You’d be grateful

if heat were, through the altocumulus, as for

the lizard, blood-affirming, a push-push.

Like meter, each day, the life-world

appearance of catclaw bark, camouflage

of catclaw bark or whatever

the first cone-bearing tree was, dull

and beautiful millennia of seeds. Design a time

-travel mission patch in spiffy

fonts? It’s just fall then rise, rise then fall.

The will is nothing but a revelation of mouths.

If it’s saying the same thing, is that speech or fall

rise fall? Of course

rise is fall is rise to stop

23
 its drip drip drip dewy forest, spondee’s backyard :

gully washer, birdless, birdful, to forego at last

your petty arc. Turned over, flat, steady, relentless

in its only key, today

plagiarizes yesterday.

24
‘The Ocean Biome : Keepsake & Egress’
— Christopher Cokinos
...beneath the rock face lies a placid ocean and beyond it, the tangled mats of
a mangrove swamp.
–Rebecca Reider

Uncanny anaglyph
poured into the cubit kingdom:
well water, “Instant Ocean,” sampled sea
reprised since the milk trucks’ residue
would have failed this awkward pool.

More than irony, less than elegy, the paddle

stroke too tired, o baby, o tank,
to fully reconcile.
The boat’s too hard to point
with these stolid oars, this
wave machine.

So tie off and float, an EVA tethered

to the dock and bumping like an amoeba
from some ancient drove against the faux rock wall.

They trucked the corals in, moved them often

to more sun or less, built
PVC protein skimmers
to keep the algae down.
They watched monsoon lightning above those mountains
beyond the masted glass, sunk their gritted skin
to cool on the beach, and, cloud-broken,
stars transuded like delegates

to this latest plenary

on hubris and humility.
Then, as now, the theme is how to shore it up.

25
 On the beach is your copy of Lowell’s Mars as the Abode of Life
and shells to collect. Does the water still hold E. biospherica,
surprise
creature from the ocean brought here and let loose, precursor to
eukaryotes? Do Martian engineers still dig their canals, valiant
and doomed, as seas recede? Men and women
swam here in 3.2 million liters.
Sometimes they saw only water.

26
‘The Lung : Heartbreak’ — Christopher Cokinos
Ubiquity of the circle, round room fractal-wide
under forest, desert, ocean, sunk to steel
-lined earth : dark Narcissus pond,
run-off, storage, conduits of the modern
atlatl leading here where this black
membrane thing with struts can descend
like a UFO to crush you
because air, like water, seeks
an amiable fix.

The curve that meets itself,

architecture of the infinite
glissando, the other myth
where things come back,
your metal slap thwacked
lit and returning, your voice a cavernous
creature yelp,
tripled till its dead.

There are 600 million

alveoli in your lungs, each
alveolus a barter of gases,
finding oxygen,
exiling CO2. A polis. And this?

Listless Hypalon,
one lung of two, the technosphere’s
clever chambers : Once
full or empty to accord such pressure
that kept the glass from breaking.

But the settlement has scattered.

Water spreads on concrete its lawful shroud.
The only science here is longing.

The shepherds crazed by Pan

called the lungs of animals lights,
including Echo’s : the lightest parts of a body.

27
 After she spurned that horny god,
they tore her apart, tendons trailed in the dirt.

Unsocketed, did she think of him

who had spurned her, looking
at his face till the watery change?

There is always heartbreak among the colonists.

In this way, they are like ones left in the old lands.
Her voice tells us what we’ve said,
and Narcissus is a flower now, but not here.
He’s upstairs, after a tunnel.

28
‘(1)’ — David Rushmer

29
‘(2)’ — David Rushmer

30
‘Tombstone’ — David Rushmer

31
‘What space between us, 2006’ — David Rushmer

32
‘Examination at the Faculty of Medicine, 1901’
— Dennis Andrew S. Aguinaldo
Windows. I was to gloss on windows without rippling the spirit.
All the noses twinkling for kisses, but each had been reserved for
the tiny thumbs of spectacles. Recall how hold on tight signaled
the wildest of freedoms. I know this, I have this, you know I have
this. You know what’s exciting? These things change and from
this point on you should refer to them as people. You know
anybody where just about nothing lurks? Before all this—what
comes in the morning? Aftertastes of daring.

33
‘Blouet, 0.61×0.49 m.’
— Dennis Andrew S. Aguinaldo
Thanking you would scatter you. Packed with ice from the nearest
sari-sari, a receiving cloth makes passing acquaintance with your
notions. Shadow lunch, timid lunch, and there’s no letting go.
Though once, there sprang some salmon, and silver running a
circle on top like a halo, but now a membrane’s starched against
all that. That’s not rain, that’s decision, pieces of decision, some
denser than others. Was to report on the dryness of youth,
however... I ran out. Our tenderness thus resigned to a joining.
My shoulder a shadow of yours, my collar a chip off your bone.
So we took liberties with chalk and pardon / shut the lids. The rest
can’t be ash but a finely crunched, deliberate sprinkling of replica.
And only if your dream isn’t you shall it count.

34
‘Medical Inspection, 0.83×0.61 m.’
— Dennis Andrew S. Aguinaldo

This is on us: we held hands, gave it moisture. “Sure,” you

exhale, but “life’s not something you get to do every day.” Or
wait, is it everyday? Syntax nazis want their manifestoes spic n’
not so little as to swing Jose or Bonaparte. Happening upon
brown, they unclasp their founder pens and color it service,
together, in English unison—at the y-fora of the bimonthly. And
if so, only when the others are busy looking... aaight? Baffore us
the pawid table: a lidded party light, and a choice between
caregiver or caretaker. We took his lying / down, once, and great
great children streamed from cell-groups to bust our hinges, so
unafraid were they of the abaci. A guanxi agent will come by
shortly to take this call—don’t worry your hansom, infraracial
head—as well as that decisive moment to grease an axiom of
decency upon which was established the suns: stand upright and
burn a few minutes more, never to tell anybody it’s going to be
okay it’s going to be okay. Not just any body.

35
‘Dog-Cart, 0.27 × 035 m.’
— Dennis Andrew S. Aguinaldo
Hope it’s a good night, a choice cut, as elevens go. How are you
and why is this. Been waiting to do filmy annotations of pages
read and admired. Then was a then, you glanced side-wise on my
time and place with them (they came to work on so long) and now
there’s no other time or place for me and you’re past the green,
holier than now, below livid arches all your own. If upon
recounting a page I scribble in, what, two solid sentences about it,
won’t it come across as dismissive? Gilding a lily my, yes, that’s
it, but if a caption fails a picture we still arrive at fanboy, don’t we
and far better people claiming the hurt so I’m positive. Your
constructs can take it. I’d like it to be a step toward something as
my “happy for you” surpasses my “happy that I’m happy for
you”—but I’d settle for it not being a step back, like a hand-me-
down bus from Japan. “Settle” is a crossword country where the
produce smells a ham-and-get-them morning. Coolly dipping
passports in water.

36
‘Alone, 1896’ — Dennis Andrew S. Aguinaldo
A lot of life went wherever it led, and now, the wire fence behind
which pecked some free-range chickens, our roots confused with
feed. Center recently conducted flaggings, as it has with breast-
scale and syndicated distress, you say? I wonder why that option,
called the Just in Case Pepper Center moved from “Do you ever
store a knife to be whipped in their affidavit,” to “Is it hard to
have a new baby,” I said. “He doesn’t really take the witness-
cheek.” When it somehow comes nervous, but at the time, excited
to make what none alive can wear as bling. Canon warned that
they’d be creative, there’s that, but they’re paying attention to the
wrong clerk. So no worries, unless there’s something we haven’t
factored in, like maybe anxiety ought to keep us going: it owes us
that much. “She was the demolition, the people, blowing on it to
see if it will scatter,” she said. Sonnez les matines. Who trebled in
and out my door.

37
‘isle of mull, 2016’ — Dominic O’Key
when animals die they
turn into stones. this is why
all stones seem both alike and unique.
bigger stones were once bigger animals,
smaller stones smaller animals.
sometimes, by looking closely
at a rock’s curves and edges,
you can make out which kind of
creature used to live in its shape:
seal, sheep, snail

38
‘Untitled’ — Grizel Luttman-Johnson
Put to the point
In a sense evaporating
The tear duct drying up
And a noose of mucous
The font of trial
Or in trying on
Drew a line across
The fleshy part of the page
If air were already
Primed by the ministry
Against over whirr
In a dirty felt bone dry
A fan of up thrust
Plus the motes daisy chained
Whirlpools whirlpool there
Always to be standing
Added in a clean undercurrent
Whale brushed up against
On this bolus undone
Beginning an industry
Set aside to fuzz
Out of pure thought soaking wet
The air vent gushing down
A garland of dust
The plughole of certainty
As already known
Erased a smudge below
The bony whole of the pen
Which earth is becoming
Over for the feral
Detached under inertia
Out of clean wit piss wet
A drain of down sunk
Dewless uncoupling
Volcanos huff here
Seldom in recline
Removed in a filthy overruling
Plankton stepping away
From no particular universe remade
Ending multiple lethargy
39
‘Osculation’ — Heather J. Macpherson
palms warm against auric skin accepting
delicate grin-creases mouth falls
against mouth like ismuth

and peninsula we are nearly surrounded by water

as each utterance laps the shoreline a held
breath released and murmured

40
‘The Sunbather’ — Heather J. Macpherson
Before, I imagined Eakins nude men
lounging cliffside, swimming below while I
crossed the Hudson River. But today, my
friend and I explore Star Island. We gasp
at the view as we twist and turn on trail.

Black cormorants linger in sea spray, sea-

gulls release their Gothic screech protecting
their young ones not ready to fly. We make
our way, bare shins battling thickets, our
knees scuffed as we climb and crawl over gran-

ite made perfect for calloused feet. The sun-

bather lays on rock with comfort and ease,
his knees pointing at the sun and I am struck
by this vision. Yes, we watch from boscage
and without shame, he sits forward, arms lean

back as hands press into rock pushing bo-

dy upward. I am a grateful witness
to this ocean vista; I watched Eakins
painting come alive while the Atlantic
crashed and spit. He stood. I could see sweat glis-

ten in the ginger nest of his figure.

I begged beneath breath for his hand to call.

41
‘The Eucalyptus Tree (Amic Deck, Wits University)’
— Kirby Manià
How strong are
the roots of the
alien tree?

Each day,
I spy it from
my office window
and it seems
resilient, hardbodied

It is after all
giant
Full-leafed, even
on this blustery
late winter day
Crowning campus
at its highest point

It reaches over
in my (general)
direction
A stationary lilt
which, as I sit,
moves me –
extending limb
upon limb
across the divide

Briefly exposed,
its cambium tissue
tells its own story of
time
Peeling its papered,
bleached bark to
teach me things,
in a language

42
I cannot speak

It was invisible
to many until now
Once a feature
of the landscape
Today, pariah

Thirsty in
an already dry land
Radicle (almost)

43
‘Field Recordings (2016)’ — Matthew Carbery
When he walked he walked not quite upright, a simian hunch.
Stopping to mark the distance gone. As though some foggy entrant
tasked. They thought: when does a path become a path. Presuming
that at some point prior there was undergrowth, then how does
it become, how is it trodden out, when does it cross the threshold
into pathdom. Here we come to a fork, a literal fork, a branch with
three prongs and from one a squirrel hangs. God knows the time.
Nooses. Looking up at the sun, wincing, and back down at his
shadow thinly stretched into thinner dust. You appear to know, but
the outward is really only largely inward. Can you see it, or is it
just a flatness, a congealed surface. Does the canine agree? Do you
ever feel like you were never. And if so what. I am answering you
without question. This ongoing is still going on. A setup. Try and
think the best of people. Chuckle with me. Go on. Let it out. In your
back pocket, a shell. She might have, or not. There is no fixer.
You are looking at a dying man. He apologises. The squirrel sways a
little in the breeze. I’m sorry I didn’t mention the breeze. It was
clear from the off. We will all die. And it will be said it was trite to
ever bring it up before its happening, like declaring needing at
the first meeting. This way there is no coming home. Bristling in
the bushes there, the motion twofold in the puddle and of itself, a
greying afternoon setting in. what do you take me for? He thinks
like you, says actually aloud at this point that that squirrel is
somehow him and thus he dangles. Like you might also regard a
Kline by the Albert Docks. A company of forty men and women
with rakes walk in a dogleg across open scrubland and enter the
coppice like a company of forty soldiers, almost silent but for
footfall. Stevens. In this way he gave you clarity, a cold blooded
clarity.

You were irritated at the dungeon of her conversation. You are not
to be blamed. We don’t want to talk. And why should I. We don’t
know. And in that, her deal is made. She is construed against him.
Longing to be a rhizome in the eye of the squirrel. Carrying out
the practice of outside, a figure of outward. We kept up with each
other. Never were they going to be nested. Of course. We were
on our paths together. And cold the frisson before leaving. His

44
marigolds wore through at the fingers, cobwebbing. An antiseptic
hint and he sudden sound of a fire’s ticking. As if counting change.
All the brazen happening in spherical disorder. Moving away from
fact into preposition, proposition, and prayer. You are suffering
from
vertigo. You can’t believe she still exists. A steam rises above their
heads. Spirit spout. We watch and make a partition in sense as
sense allows. Down from the bluff there are flitting tickets of
wrens somehow together. Well-being of the dwarf species’ seems
to rely on an imbalance up there in the spheres. Pursuing policies,
or an ant’s nest. We are held to account by this, the branding iron
and steel beams.

Enclosure came. Buy into its trust nationally. We rise to a hawking.

The queen and the cage fighter. Rolling cloud forms shadow the
breach there between fork and man, squirrel and branch. An
escalation of the value in the sheer context of brute being, globular
dazes on the retina and a glue at the back of the wren throat,
trickling. As a danger at least.

At least as a danger there would be an arch doubt. They string

along. It is unintentional in the franco-germanic sense. In the
Venn Husserl’s being born. An ungrammatical forwardness. On
his way home against belief he sighted a heron on the eviscerated
whale’s ribcage of a downed vessel. It is morning and she is still
sleeping. Night shifts, rolls over. If you are so clever then why
do you sleep alone tonight? The run on sense is a stagger of
mattering. Looking out for number one, it’s reckless calculus a
wayward adverb in the midst of a sleepy mist. Bray why don’t you,
the army is in town. Stunted from the topmost. He has applied
himself like adhesive, he snores consonants. Work begins at ten,
humbly designed, some never real ultimatum shadowing in the
peripheral. A fixture is being mixed up with a general transience.

Those days gone, having had the chance. Sat back and past tense
moments acquire currency in the realisation. To realise as in not
just knowing, recognising, but the making real in the thinking
itself. A machinist imitates a drum kit imitates a heart beating
clockwise. In the day-coloured sink acquiring grease in invisible
stretches across the span. In this hand a truncheon, in the other
45
 some body’s love handle. His standing anterior to the bluff. As if
demanding orisons, a spectral flutter. Pygmy owl. A talon holds
a preyed upon thing. These arrangements in decline. And what if
not for a human thought. Imposter. Getting grey at the temples,
readying grown. Like a Montreal balladeer coming out of early
retirement given the circumstances ofembezzlement. Here are
words, spaces. To be music or otherwise a sonorous rivulet passing
from the foreground to a sloping destination unaware. The camel
who shat in the river is named Herodotus after a fashion. Dashing
from the ridge backwards, imitating child’s play.

She was wary of such approaches. Knowing he was unlikely

to make it through September. His standard flew flimsy. That
listing kite. In the poem by Hopkins, in the knavedom of Hynes.
Between wives he hunted whistling hold music ad infinitum.
Don’t you think I would have said if I knew? As though noting
the act is akin to carrying it out. There are no proper names.
These avatars are Prussian and settle like piss in the snow. That
way can you spell the trace you constitute, are you aloud then.
Missing killing falling rather. The stereoscopic trigger sound of
electromagnetic discharge. You’re needing a bigger boat. On the
way to lunar magnitudes embedded with windless imprints across
the dense unmappable stellar wash. No leeward without first
inclement weather. This desire for ozone. Or otherwise in keeping
with a preference for aerosols. What is the meaning of this, is it
something to write home about. She worries for his mother more
than for him. He very well understands the canopy he found to
define himself beneath. A dealt waste form. Buttered up. Some
materiel matter, the garrison worked up into a lather. Beside
probabilities of campuses. This is the plan, we like each other,
what else is there to worry about. She found out later that he had
already been buried. No words not because thoughtless or alterior
to itself. Machinations in the sullen hours when she applies herself
and sets out in visible clods of steam to desk work flow. A pocket
watch. A reconnaissance. In Gallic spirits. This is an interim. He is
doubtless admittedly. Buried as detailed. Your girder bends back,
gifts. Can you see it, or is it just a flatness, a congealed surface.
Looping back to track every pore. The hollow hill breathes. My god
is there an animus for real. Reaching for a holstered thing, world
spinning. This opening beneath treeline. My god is she really real.
46
For the hardness of trouble. All these locrian scalings, heightened
rapturous denial. The way a man pretending not to recognise fear
pushes on longingly. Barely a one cares for arrogant trajectories.
But you are letting us all down. I want to take you swimming so
you can save me from drowning. He is so scared of water. And thus
hardens. From what you have said it could be any day now. Does he
gang up alone? Pronounced. Seeded in a run off sluice, eventually
cracked concrete and lawsuits. Longing for a close shave. Here the
whirl matters what with persistent dying. Where she works, they
all seem to. My interests are covering over. A sore shades. Cobble
sense, lover.

Now a raptor sizes up the viscera. In the mistake global.

Registering for effect a dismal extension into feeling. This is
the first time I haven’t been in love since my memory serves.
Getting auld. Can you pass or forego. What only seems the
drastic measure? Grimaldi. The firstborn is deafened. To have
cannibalised in the womb. Listening out for her siren. Works of
love.

Glistens a shallow pool. Around hello and helplessness. You want

what you want and who is to tell you otherwise. They insisted
stop using that word, there is no love of children. Hankering after
some blithe affectation in the mizzen. Here by the breakers you
just know there are sharpest rocks. A sand bank reclines toward
the inlet and the clifftop coastal path. Playing doom. Offered and
left. She is an enigma short of breath. I replicate the accents and
chastise the ceiling fan. That feeling when. Articulation as a means
to bypass confrontation, like a heavy goods vehicle. Squirreling
away your knowing.

Supposing she knew all along but perseverance got the better
of her and suddenly three years have passed and there is no
meanwhile to feel left behind by. It swings of an orbit something
catastrophic. The signal climax and slantwise cringe in taking it.
What you think of as sex is necessary. Not that the values have
somehow dissipated but that they were only ever scaffolding.
Stood upright making the argument. Yes he reclines, yes he knows
how to make it work. But her apparatuses either failed or finally
started working when she settled for another seduction. Witched.
47
 Needing wanting narrative as anchor. The other seduction. An
education. The water is soft here so the locals drink stout. An odd
one in twenty will at home ferment their own, high sugar content
and an average alcohol by volume level of around seven percent.
Men in their late twenties slump like disinterested coils. I have a
hearty constitution, do not worry about me. Where they boil water
before wiping their mouths with their sleeves and carrying the
milk pans out into the gardens in a total chill with steam rising in
gorgeous little tendrils. To give someone hope is a very dangerous
thing.

He turns himself in for the indecent images he has accessed.

He hopes so much that life will as an entirety forgive him. But
now, chemically castrated, he crops his long hair and shaves and
wears contacts. He flattens his manner. His weakness led him to
a material state of ruination, buggered in the larder of a young
offender’s wing by a likewise but bigger more cocksure ward of the
state.

48
‘shoaling’ — Natalie Joelle
1. researchfish and the Blackfish
the speedboats just
herded them in
and then they could just
pick out the young ones

2. researchfish and the Dragons

JAWS and the Dragon
submit this information
is a condition

3. researchfish and the Sea dragons

4. researchfish and the Sea World

they stored the whales in what is called a module
all whales in captivity
are psychologically traumatised
if you were in a bathtub
for twenty-five years don’t you think

49
 5. researchfish and the Dawn
we were not told much about it
other than it was trainer error

6. researchfish and the research vessels

loophole in the law
in the name of research
whale meat is sold for

7. researchfish and The Black Fish

illegal and destructive fishing practices
for the increasingly threatened sea life
industrial overfishing of our oceans

8. researchfish and the dead line

researchfish captures information
capture and track the impact

9. researchfish and the dead line

researchfish is a service provided by Researchfish Ltd
Massgrave Farm

10. researchfish and the trawl

there will be no formal sanctions for non-com-
pliance of student outcome reporting
in the annual submission survey

11. researchfish and the trawl

compliance levels may be taken
into account
during assessment of future applications
for training

12. researchfish and the Sea Shepherd

we are not a protest organisation
we are an interventionist organisation

50
we intervene against illegal activities

13. researchfish and the Sea Shepherd

this not a protest action
this is a law enforcement action

14. researchfish and the wise monkeys

see no e-Val
hear no e-Val
do no e-Val

51
‘Blot: A Narrative’ — Peter Adkins
He was cleaning his knives in gravy-red water. I decided not to tell
him about the dream.

Well, he said. He stopped speaking. He started again. You would

have to buy it from a slaughterhouse north of the border. There’s
only corporate killing houses here now. They don’t touch that sort
of thing. It’s gone to the dogs here.

He was speaking too many words at once.

Can I write that down? I asked.

You’ll only get that sort of thing in the north, he said. It’s gone to
the dogs here.

Oh, I replied. I pretended to write in a pad that I found in my

pocket. I was feeling unwell.

Will it come in a big pot? I asked. The blood, I added.

No, he said. It won’t come in a pot.

Should I take a big pot myself?

Yes, he said, you’ll want your own pot.

Driving north I kept the pot steady by wrapping it in one of dad’s

old sweaters and threading the passenger seatbelt through the
arms. At the border there were three blacks crows arguing with one
another about a fence post. The biggest one lost.

The slaughterhouse was on the side of a dual carriageway

that went all the way to the furthest point. It was a squat, square
building the size of an out-of-town retail park shop but without
the signage or doorways. A man came out of a little cabin by the
52
entrance, just like they said on the phone. He waved me over. When
he saw that I had brought a big pot with me, he shook his head.

The pot? I asked.

It comes in a pot, he said. The blood.

He took it out of my hands. It needs a double catch, he said,

tapping the lid. For spillage.

For spillage, I repeated. I didn’t have my notepad with me to

write all the details down. He wore sideburns like father and brown
gloves despite the mild weather.

We went around the back of the square building. There weren’t

any animals around.

Where are the animals? I asked.

He didn’t say anything. I wondered if he couldn’t hear me

because of the sounds from the dual carriageway. I shouted the
question again. He stopped and turned around.

There are animals here, he said.

Oh, I said. I was pleased that we were speaking again. Yes, I

corrected myself. Yes, I repeated, seeing a magpie on one of the
CCTV cameras.

It isn’t that there are no animals, as such, I continued, shouting

as we walked. It is that there aren’t any of the bigger animals. I had
expected to see the bigger animals.

It was getting on for evening.

Look, he said. Here. He pointed at a small yellow bin with a

strange lid next to a roller shutter that ran almost the full height of
the building.

The pot? I asked. He nodded.

53
 It didn’t look like a pot. It looked more like a small yellow bin. I
wondered if I should tell him.

Oh, yes? I said. Can I see it? I asked. Inside I mean.

He bent down, loosened the catches and removed the lid. It was
much blacker than I had hoped.

Is it heavy? I asked.

Oh, he said. Yes. It is quite heavy.

Can you decant it for me? I asked. I pointed to the pot which I had
brought with me. He didn’t seem to understand. He put the lid back
over the blood.

Money, he said.

What money? I asked. I looked at the floor for coins but I couldn’t
see any money.

For the blood, he said.

The blood money, he added and coughed. I took the money from
my pocket and counted it into his glove.

He nodded at the blood. What do you want with it?

Art, I replied. I’d rehearsed this lie on the drive up.

He didn’t say anything.

Art, I repeated.

He bent down, wrapped his arms round the container and started
waddling with it against his chest towards the car.

54
 *

I was in a hurry so I ate the spaghetti as I dressed. The dinner suit I

had seen in the dream and had bought from Oxfam was too small.
I wore father’s suit instead. My head was still aching a bit, but I felt
less sick. There were large dark puddles in the kitchen from where
the decanting had gone wrong. I had filled the pot to the brim and
had enough left in the yellow bin to fill an empty paint tin I had
found beneath the stairs.

A lot of the blood had gone on the floor. It’s OK, I thought. The
cats will want it. I whistled them but they didn’t come.

I walked quickly to the restaurant. It was busy. That seemed

correct, as far as I could tell. Beneath exposed bulbs hanging on
long wires, men and women stood at tall tables chewing mouthfuls
of pork. Stringy fibres caught in their teeth. Smeary-faced children
ran between the legs. A plaster cast of a smiling pig suspended
from the ceiling rocked in the air from the ventilator. Yes, I thought.
You are the ones who are in for it.

I threw the pot at the large glass front of the restaurant. It made
a loud noise as it bounced, the lid flying off as it came back towards
me. The blood went down the front of my shirt and trousers.

I looked up. The people in the restaurant had stopped eating. I

knew what I had to do next, even though it wasn’t in the dream. I
threw the paint tin. This one came back much faster.

When I woke up my eyes were stinging and my back was sticking

to the ground. A man in an apron was shouting words at me too
quickly to understand and I didn’t have my pad to write them down.
He kept prodding me with the end of his shoes. I decided I ought
to leave. My legs weren’t working in the correct fashion so I put my
hands out in in front of me and dragged one knee after the other
along the high-street.

It was definitely night now. I could tell this because the orange
lamps were fully orange.

55
 Hullo Adkins.

I looked up.

It was Professor Grig from art school. He was with his wife.

What’s this? He asked.

Hullo, I said. I looked at myself in the reflection of a shop

window. The blood was matted in my hair.

Is this something? he asked.

Streaks of blood ran along my trousers in broad rivulets. The

cream jacket was now the smeary red of mother’s wardrobe.

Are you doing something? He asked.

I didn’t say anything.

Yes, Grig said. You’re doing something aren’t you?

Art, I said. I don’t know why I said it that time.

He laughed. Very witty, Adkins, he said. Yes, I think I see what

you’re doing.

He took a step backward and said something to his wife. He

looked at me again. Mrs Grig didn’t say anything. Her mouth was
open, a bit. Can I? He asked and nodded to his phone. He held it up
in front of me and took a photo. Then he turned around and took
one of himself with me in the background.

I’ll leave you to it, he said. He bent down to where I was and spoke
in a quieter voice. I think you’ll find a better spot for it a bit further
along, he said, where it’s busier. He pointed towards McDonalds
and Debenhams.

Yes, I said. Thank you.

56
 It’s too quiet for it down this end of the street, he said.

Yes, I repeated.

I watched him hold the door for his wife as they entered the pork
restaurant. I dragged myself further down the street to where he
had pointed. I stopped outside Debenhams and rested for a while,
keeping both hands and my knees on the ground because that’s a
way of resting.

The street was busier here. People were stopping to look at me,
some were laughing and taking photos on their phones. An old man
choked as he passed.

I moved to a square position with my hands and knees equally

spaced from one another. It was another way of resting.

Some of the blood was in my mouth now. I spat it all out bit by
bit onto the pavement. It grew darker. A group of men in sporting
shirts came over. One of them kicked me in the place where my ribs
live. Ow, I said. Don’t. That hurts. The men he was with laughed and
kicked me in the rear.

A figure in a white overall came out of a doorway opposite and

walked over, shouting. The men hurried away.

Well, he said.

I looked up from where I was resting.

What’s happened here? He asked.

It was the butcher.

Do you need cleaning up? Some looking after?

I tried to remember where I had left the pot.

Do you know about the dream? I replied.

57
 He nodded.

Do you know how it’s meant to end?

Not like this, he said.

I looked down at myself. Yes, I was wearing the wrong clothes, I

thought.

Is that why? I said.

Why what? He asked. He looked confused.

The clothes, I replied.

Yes, he answered.

It wasn’t meant to happen like this, I said.

You need cleaning up, he said.

OK, I said. I lay down on my back, shut my eyes and put my legs
and arms in the air.

No, he said. Not like that.

He gestured for me to come to him. My legs weren’t working at

all now so I squirmed on my stomach towards him. He tried to pick
me up but I struggled. I had remembered the pot and the paint tins.
They were still outside the restaurant.

Don’t worry about the tins, he said.

The cats? I asked.

Yes, he said. The cats will.

He put his arm under my father’s trousers and picked me up.

Where are we going? I asked.

58
 There, he nodded.

The butchers, I said.

Together? I asked.

Yes, he said.

59
‘Specific Inherited Mutations’ — Rachel Gippetti
‘A typo occurs every 100,000 nucleotides’, which means

100,000 female swordfish swam like a shadow, under the belly of a cargo boat
containing flat-packed X-ray machines, then stabbed the boat,
which cracked and sank,
the radioactive waves crashing to the seabed, where I slept
on our honeymoon in Greece, typing, blissful in my sleep.

Or the nucleus of a dream I had (where we made love in my parents’ bed)

was damaged
when I woke up suddenly.
10am at work, while typing, I developed an allergy to Tide Ultra, so
while scratching my thigh, things got typoed.

Or a bilateral tide at Jones Beach on Long Island tore off my bikini top,
which was sucked into a glass bottle, then washed onto Beach Park shoreline,
where a young girl, with a long red braid, found it
and wrote back to me. An amateur writer,
her letter contained numerous typos.

Or my mother wrote a poem, in which she encoded a secret,

adding 100,000 letters to the alphabet. She buried
the poem in a red maple box, at the bottom of the Muddy River. Over the years

the tides tugged the box through the silt, into the Atlantic. I don’t understand

the process of water filtration, but this morning, when I turned on the tap
the box popped out into the womb of my teapot
and while drinking my tea, I got it.

60
‘LUCID’ — Skye McDade-Burn

1
The first time I took Lucid
it was all sight, all seen, at once
pushing the world into place
bruised
and softer
a stretched
sense of everything
of all the plastic in the sea
behind the eyes

held without tension

And I
was in a boat, echoing heaven
dripping myself into

Lucid alignment

of chemistry and cash,

like if you stopped everything moving

no one would be themselves
caught out on the beach

in a new colder dawn.

only that insect across the neck

traces across, in this stupid restlessness

Journeys on foot and water

netted into me
the Lucid body trip is
tidal, the ligaments are points of lightness

61
 the bones are what drop
and
the complete weather
wells up gripping

green energy blending into Columbus

62
 2
The trip is always slipping
into new spaces, their clean
sweet-smelling gardens
burning orange
centre, laughing
ship demon
yes, bodies bust

but afterwards everything kept spinning

continents crunching and grinding

because Lucid is pure connection
we are already there
our face in the netting, the laughter

when the lucid body trip is raging

power is becoming limp
every thing is smells
I am living
blind
and charged with the future
selling Lucid the movement is born
in packets and grey bodies

inside the Nazi cult fetish

when the master says bite

I bite
we are all getting stronger
steel wires are lining the city
the potential in everything to be
more
where the personality humanist complex
does not manifest
there are no more selves:
paramilitaries / the streets

63
 we pre-empt reality
everywhere
cactus
eye-carried in you
hood over his head
(passengers file past)
girlfriend screaming

64
 3
Putting down my beer
jolts stagger on through me

to latch myself forward, broken

stabilise my feral planet

sometimes I have to cough:

the future is blocked in mouth

nuggets are nuggets are fucking

my whole grey sky, my silence

and sitting sweating there, in their little lumps

bubbling in my growth
in my mode so sweet untouched
towering wet monolith, sheer body of

infinite profit with small hard tongues

all the little cities dotted across the plains

on the street

there is still a white lump with roots

hot and scratching around itself

this thing is so death slow

always has to be squeezed through this

being a dog dirty pus tunnel

I am stuck in my throat and my legs are stiff

how we let them do it

out there

65
 4
even solids are born in fire
multiply
but ask us to melt for them
as they harden
they drain us and yet
we can do so much
when we are emptied out
stop trying to understand
you are gone
nothing is equivalent
we just take part
crush the worm inside
crush the worm its still there
i can hear myself and its scary
i fucked by striplights
want to not hear you
we can resist our completion
just keep this scum life

66
 5
a centre.

Unsummedup
people eating. Chefs.
Kamagra Jelly.
Laws tense and fragile

because people can be squeezed –

Because
pigs. Because
I want to be a hero
w nothing on me
and that is why
I love lobbies.

harder than

Funk without face / grizzly squadron

black chamber.

the little tree that fights

in secret bloody boxes.
Collective shape of naked and massive mob

Every year the cost of

production in human
life is growing
larger.

when it makes you move it

with huge rotten raspberries

as big as your fist
mottled salmon and slime-brown.
I am still here.

67
 Every year the
cost of production in
Lucid body trip as mildew

I am beating up
can you seriously kill your personality
and everyone else / so that we
can actually dredge something up from this cloud of petrol

68
‘Sepia Night’ — Sneha Subramanian Kanta
emergencies are haphazard vacations
(you aligned them with the lint of august)

post-truth of Nietzsche
like snake-skins clad,
slithering past the lone forest
filling with noise of rustlings.

the reflections over your eyelash –

shadowed over my body
in perpetual Calcutta heat, as the Hooghly streamed on.

69
‘Fenollosa manuscript’
— Sneha Subramanian Kanta
You train me in Japanese art forms
and diverge into the world of being:
not sea-swarmed by illegitimates,
as postmodern newspapers claim.

The politikal language is loosening

itself in distilled embers.

Unbecoming, as you placed your

hand within my palm, once –
within the amniotic fluid of a forest,
the reserve of bees and small fish.

We set tidal waves in the grove

against evening, and ourselves,

to unmoor.

70
‘Acclaimed Ashes’ — Sneha Subramanian Kanta
The night exhales a sigh
like the panting of a tired train;
the beauty of perseverance,
struggles of patient nothings.
People complain of being weary,
price rise, decay and accidents,
attempt to bring discursive things
into a linear order
(not essentially in that order)
I speak of stark polarity
than tongues that fetch cash or coinage
like reptiles or beetles lined for fodder.
I cover my pride and shame into the womb
of a musky autumn day; in my seclusion
ponder the propaganda of governments and
the impoverishment of my own redness inside.
I draw a flag and hoist it in wildernesses
spreading inside my mind — if only peace treaties
were as easy to establish.

71
‘An Unsettling Effect’ — Steve Spence
We may
be looking
at a crash-
landing.
Would you
like to see
my tattoos?
“I’m not
a lounge
lizard, I’m
a flaneur,”
he said.
Yet people
thought
they were
flying with
the birds
when they
walked
across this
bridge.
Shyness
feeds on
itself. It’s
difficult
to follow
this but
here is
one past
civilisation
that is as
silent as
the grave.
Your sound
must be
razor sharp
with no

72
blurred
edges.

73
‘Expanding The Search Area’ — Steve Spence
“Each to their own,” she said. We will have
to try an entirely new approach yet surface
water flooding is also expected and it’s what

happens after you hook one that makes the

difference. “It’s a very selfish lifestyle,” he
said, after having admitted that he got his

first shotgun at the age of sixteen. If it’s not

neo-liberal it’s not going to happen. Has anyone
sued yet? “Once upon a time I was a game-

keeper but now I’m a poacher,” he said. These

drawings aren’t made by pushing a rake across
a surface yet alongside walking and storytelling

it’s a very human thing to do. Here we have the

basic principles of fingerprint analysis. Now the
biting makes sense. Is there such a thing as

incontrovertible evidence? “Yet the more we look

at the cosmos the stranger it becomes,” she said.
Do you ever suffer from indecision? You don’t

know what’s around the corner if you bite into

something that’s unsafe yet nature is full of design
flaws that we’re all trying to fix. Next time you

fancy doing something really frustrating, try

balancing a pencil on its sharpened tip. “Set
me free from what exactly?” she said.

74
‘An Expert In The Field’ — Steve Spence
“Perfection belongs only to narrated
events,” she said. When are we planning
on going to the lake? Let’s venture into

the maze. Are you a creative powerhouse?

Sometimes an exit turns out to be a new
opening but trusting your gut instinct is

not a reliable way to size people up. Today

we’re using a float for bite indication. Dozens
of fish disappear in a flash yet the intelligence

may be more in the data than in the algorithm.

Even more baffling are the three large holes
blown into the ground yet our swirling shoal

has nowhere to go and feeding begins. “Some

still view the multiverse as an abdication of
scientific responsibility,” she said. Can we

choose which memories to keep and which

to get rid of? For instance, some bacteria kill
themselves as soon as they are infected by a

virus. Here we have a series of layered compos-

itions. What do you think about the knife angel?
Growing up destined to live in water means there

are many skills to master yet in the darkness

the crabs can feel their surroundings. Why is
it useful to be able to recognise voices at all?

75
‘An Underwater Shot’ — Steve Spence
It’s all to do with the tidal cycle. “We have
a clear view of what society could be like but
we have no way of getting there,” he said.

Suddenly, there’s this awkward, swirling

wind. “A coherent script is a good starting
point,” she said. Navigating by the stars is

never an easy thing to do but for now this

remains a capricious co-existence. When
you’re creating an engraving you have to

press really hard to allow the paper to soak

up the ink. “I’d still like to get a thousand
out of it,” he said. What happens next depends

on what you think money actually is. Are we

in the presence of a domestic drama? “Surely
our current form of globalisation has a design

fault yet an information economy may not be

compatible with a market economy,” he said.
Are we capable of striking populist gestures?

“Mr Steed, how resplendent you look,” she

said. In a way they have grasped that if climate
change is real, capitalism is finished. Yet an

hour of physical activity a day is the ideal and

our next tactic is to target the margin. How literal
can we be about the skyline as a starting point?

76
‘Tide Tables’ — Steve Spence
Look at the colour of the sun.
Look at the colour of that sun.
In winter the sea is much warmer
than the land. “See how the sun
shines brightly,” she said. “This
is why the tiger needs the crab,”
he said. “You can see from the
colour of my face that my body
is warm”, she said. Yet it turns
out that airborne natural molecules
do indeed boost our health. “It’s
just round the next bend again,”
he said. Sphagnum, sphagnum,
moss, moss, moss, rotting feet,
trenchfoot.

77
‘Canalchemy #2’ — Steve Hitchins

}
26 lbs of Bone Mixed with water, then made into bricks and
14 lbs of Lynn Sand fritted in a hard part of the biscuit kiln, then
2 lbs of Potash pounded and ground for use.
40 lbs of the above frit
20 lbs of China clay

Stage two is the stage of the glacial. Bone phase. Scatterfly-vulvae.

Mollusc puckered. Firing the moon. Past the powder magazines at
Maesarul where the canals meet and the road spurs off to Tesco. Cherry
Tango can in gravel. Basket of sodden car mats. Brown hen perches on
wooden garden fence. Gunpowder bought in bulk. Boated up in barrels.
Stored and sold from the magazines. Behind blinds monitor-staring
stubbleface fingers pressed to lips. Beeley has contracted some
pecuniary liability he wishes to evade. You well know that you engaged
that the secret should be entirely confined to ourselves. White rapids
in distance a bend in the Taff. Satellite dish clamped to beheaded trunk.
Jackdawed cables.

D4.5 Business in Focus

D5 Key Worldwide Logistics Ltd
D6 JR Workspace
D7 Telephone Exchange
D8.1 DecTek
D8.2 RS Components
D8.3 Brecon Pharmaceuticals
D11.1 Lloyds TSB Bank Plc

Albedo whitening. Filtration to remove improper materials. Fears of

discovery induce them to avoid public highways. Undergoing heating
carrying the essence sought extracted. Twenty hour journey between
Merthyr and Cardiff, time added for an overnight stop. Battered
greenhouse birdtable garden. Pylon looms a mechanical wigwam.
Tubular rust-rails thread through concrete stumps. We cook our
bacon, eggs and chips in the cabin in the 3 mile pond from Treble Locks
to Rhydyfelin, where the gypsies are. Pink blossom gathers at pave-
ment’s crumbled edges. Wrinklefaced lilac shellsuit glances hurrying. I
was fearfull my letter had got lost, or had fallen into somebodys hands it
ought not, & might lead to discovery where we was. Neon forget-me-nots
blaze through telegraph nettle-patch. Bring the ducks in mother, here’s
the boatman coming. Lap of current against rocks. Birds burble and
wheeze. Bus exquishes to roundabout. Y Badwr, yr Hen Ddiawl - that old
devil the boatman.

78
 D11.2 Q Conference Centre/Garnish Cymru
D11.3 Dutton International Ltd
D11.4 Dutton International Ltd
D11.5 Barclays Bank Plc
D11.6 PRESS
D10.4 Nat West Bank Plc
D10.3 Dandie Crafts Ltd
D10.2 Estate Cafe

Luminal. Edibled. Dandelion seeds drift down terrace of Williams Place.

Pub chalkboard every Saturday quiz night jackpot and voucher to be won.
Tracksuit man sneezes coming out of doors. At the Upper Boat, east bank
of the river, is a curious contrivance. A ferry-boat provided with a stage,
elevated or depressed by iron pins passing into its framework, a
platform on which trams are conveyed from the bank. Billboards
advertise satellite television lager cars take-away chicken bottled
water. A rope across the river passes through a pully attached to the boat.
Towering magazine images of gleaming lifestyle flat against grey clouds.
On canal bank men in rimmed hats sweep the towpath with brooms.
Vapours rise from chemical vessel. They travel on by-paths and parish
roads in order to avoid observation. Extraction of essence as soul
becomes conscious of itself and its own light nature. Inner marriage
with moon woman. Second rebirth of lunar child. Chrysalis colours.
Milk-smooth lustre. Tint capricious.

79
‘TEN TINY POEMS (30 January 2016)’ — Stuart Ross
i

Grippers.

ii

Linked
ears.

iii

Polio.
Water park.

iv

Pencil
cut.

Paper
scratch.

Simple beautiful
torch fiend exercise.

80
vi

Fog. Frog
keeps
asking for
Christ.

vii

Hey, stack
those words
on my head.

viii

I fly
fly swatters.
I am making
ink.

ix

Clipper. Sinkhole.
Coyote. A darn
elephant lies in state.

Talk into the square hole in

your friend’s oval head.

81
‘DECOMPRESSION’ — Stuart Ross
He stole a chip. We went hungry.
The potato field wept. The hurricane was named Luc.
The sky! It’s got clouds in it!
A chimney fell. Mister got crushed.

Did you count the chips? Was there one fewer?

It was in a warehouse. An inside job.
Who was in charge? Get that guy.
Look for his beard. Search the alley.

Did you count the chips? Numbers are important.

A dog blew away. I’m holding his leash.
The president spoke. Air escaped the cabin.
Everyone froze. The plane didn’t land.

82
‘Ringwood’ — Tom Betteridge
RINGWOOD

Hydrous mantle transition zone indicated by ringwoodite

included within diamond

The ultimate origin of water in the Earth’s hydrosphere is

in the deep Earth—the mantle. Theory1 and
experiments2, 3, 4 have shown that although the water
storage capacity of olivine-dominated shallow mantle is
limited, the Earth’s transition zone, at depths between 410
and 660 kilometres, could be a major repository for water,
owing to the ability of the higher-pressure polymorphs of
olivine—wadsleyite and ringwoodite—to host enough
water to comprise up to around 2.5 per cent of their
weight. A hydrous transition zone may have a key role in
terrestrial magmatism and plate tectonics5, 6, 7, yet
despite experimental demonstration of the water-bearing
capacity of these phases, geophysical probes such as
electrical conductivity have provided conflicting results8,
9, 10, and the issue of whether the transition zone
contains abundant water remains highly controversial11.
Here we report X-ray diffraction, Raman and infrared
spectroscopic data that provide, to our knowledge, the
first evidence for the terrestrial occurrence of any higher-
pressure polymorph of olivine: we find ringwoodite
included in a diamond from Juína, Brazil. The water-rich
nature of this inclusion, indicated by infrared absorption,
along with the preservation of the ringwoodite, is direct
evidence that, at least locally, the transition zone is
hydrous, to about 1 weight per cent. The finding also

83
 indicates that some kimberlites must have their primary
sources in this deep mantle region.

Samples of mantle-derived peridotites show that olivine

(Mg2SiO4) is the dominant phase in the Earth’s shallow
upper mantle, to a depth of ~400 km (ref. 12). At greater
depths, between approximately 410 and 660 km, within
the transition zone, the high-pressure olivine polymorphs
wadsleyite and ringwoodite are thought to dominate
mantle mineralogy owing to the fit of seismic
discontinuity data to predictions from phase equilibria12,
13. No unretrogressed samples of any high-pressure
olivine polymorph have been sampled from the mantle,
and, hence, this inference is highly likely, but is
unconfirmed by sampling. Sampling the transition zone is
important because it is thought to be the main region of
water storage in the solid Earth, sandwiched between
relatively anhydrous shallow upper mantle and lower
mantle4, 5, 6, 7. The potential presence of significant
water in this part of the Earth has been invoked to explain
key aspects of global volcanism5 and has significant
implications for the physical properties and rheology of
the transition zone3, 11, 14. Finding confirmatory
evidence of the presence of ringwoodite in Earth’s mantle,
and determining its water content, is an important step in
understanding deep Earth processes.

The discovery of ultradeep diamonds, originating below

the lithospheric mantle15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, allows
a unique window into the material constituting the Earth’s

84
transition zone. As such, these diamonds should provide
the best opportunity for finding both wadsleyite and
ringwoodite. Moreover, several studies have reported
olivine that may have originated as a higher-pressure
polymorph21, 22, 23, 24, 25.

In this study, we focused on diamonds from the Juína

district of Mato Grosso, Brazil, in a search for ultrahigh-
pressure inclusions. Alluvial deposits centred on
tributaries East of the Rio Aripuanã, Juína District,
contain abundant diamonds that originate in the Earth’s
transition zone and lower mantle15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 24, 26.

Diamond JUc29 is a 0.09 g, colourless/light-brown,

irregular crystal (Extended Data Fig. 1) from deposits of
the Rio Vinte e Um de Abril, downstream from kimberlite
pipe Aripuanã-01. It exhibits a high degree of surface
resorption, is moderately plastically deformed and its
nitrogen content is below detection by infrared
spectrometry; that is, the diamond is type IIa. These are all
characteristics of most ultradeep diamonds from Juína18.
A crystal of greenish appearance and ~40 μm in its
maximum dimension was located optically in the diamond
(Extended Data Fig. 1). Synchrotron X-ray tomography
shows the inclusion to form part of a pair, with a Ca-rich
and a Fe-bearing phase immediately adjacent (Extended
Data Fig. 2). Single-crystal X-ray diffraction of the Fe-
bearing phase revealed the main four diffraction peaks of
ringwoodite, in their relative order of expected intensity4,
that is, in descending order of intensity, the (113) plane at

85
 2.44 Å, the (440) plane at 1.40 Å, the (220) plane at 2.81 Å
and the (115) plane at 1.51 Å (Extended Data Fig. 3). The
expected fifth peak at about 2.02 Å was not found, being
covered by the very intense diamond peak, which occurs
at the same d spacing (the single distance between two
atomic lattice planes belonging to a family of infinite
lattice planes all equidistant and parallel). The positions of
these peaks (that is, the d spacing) and, in particular, the
precisely measured relative order of intensities, detected
by charge-coupled device (CCD), confirm the identity of
the inclusion as ringwoodite but do not allow an accurate
compositional estimate.

Micro-Raman spectra of the inclusion (Fig. 1, grey traces)

allowed ringwoodite to be identified by the two intense
Raman bands that form a doublet corresponding to the
asymmetric (T2g) and symmetric (A1g) stretching
vibrations of SiO4 tetrahedra and which occur in the
spectral regions ~807 and 860 cm−1, respectively. We
refer to these bands as DB1 and DB2, respectively. The
spacing of these two bands is 30% wider than those
present in olivine, and DB1 is displaced to significantly
lower wavenumbers. Band DB1 in JUc29 is defined from
peak fitting to be located between 807 and 809 cm−1,
with DB2 between 854 and 860 cm−1. The increase in
wavenumber of both DB1 and DB2 relative to the
reference spectrum in Fig. 1 (red trace) and other
synthetic ringwoodites is due largely to the influence of
the compressive stress developed around the inclusion.
This stress results from the difference in the volume

86
expansion of the inclusion relative to the diamond that
has helped to preserve the ringwoodite. All JUc29 Raman
spectra show significant broadening of these SiO4
stretching vibrations. This broadening is probably due to
increased disordering resulting from a tendency for
ringwoodite to revert to olivine at lower pressure, and
hampers the use of the doublet band separation in
estimating the composition of the ringwoodite.
Nevertheless, an estimate of the composition can be
attempted, on the basis of the shift in DB1 in response to
pressure and increasing Fe in the structure, which have
opposite effects (see Methods section on Raman
spectroscopy). The compressive stress imposed on the
inclusion was estimated by measuring the Raman shift of
the main diamond band in the immediately adjacent
diamond (1,337 cm−1), which yields internal pressures of
between 1.7 and 2.3 GPa depending on the pressure
calibration of the Raman shift used (see Methods as
above). Our estimate for the resulting phase composition
yields a Mg number, Mg# = 100Mg/(Mg+Fe), of , where
the uncertainty is dominated by the uncertainty in the
confining pressure, the exact position of DB1 and the
calibration of DB1’s position with composition (see
Methods as above). Although the compositional
uncertainty is large, the presence of significant Fe in the
structure is consistent with the confocal X-ray
fluorescence data (Extended Data Fig. 2).
Two main scenarios arise from the water-rich nature of
the ringwoodite inclusion coming from transition-zone
depths. In one, water within the ringwoodite reflects
inheritance from a hydrous, diamond-forming fluid, from

87
 which the inclusion grew as a syngenetic phase. In this
model, the hydrous fluid must originate locally, from the
transition zone, because there is no evidence that the
lower mantle contains a significant amount of water.
Alternatively, the ringwoodite is ‘protogenetic’, that is, it
was present before encapsulation by the diamond and its
water content reflects that of the ambient transition zone.
Both models implicate a transition zone that is at least
locally water-rich. It is interesting to explore the
protogenetic option further to see what bounds would be
placed on the bulk transition-zone water content in the
light of geophysical observations.

88
‘Erotica’— Tom Snarsky
Have you always owed the figuration of water
Special deference, like a cloud

I am continuing to pretend every creature I see

Can fire laser beams at unsuspecting hunters
To trace the difference between steam & fog

Of course, blood—
That would be another animal altogether

89
‘The Sons Of Hell’ — William Telford
It was after about five days out that The Rooster went kind of banzai and
jumped overboard yelling stuff that made no coherence, and took The
Captain with him. After some push and shove we managed to haul The
Rooster back on the boat but as we were dragging The Captain over the
side a big tiger shark, I think it was, came up and took of his left leg just
below the knee. Last we saw of the leg was it going under clamped in that
great big fish’s great big grin. Well, at least someone was happy.
We did our best for The Captain, tried to make a tourniquet out of The
Old Man’s belt, and The Old Man’s trousers fell down, he’d already lost
some weight, but about four hours later The Captain started babbling
something about his mother and just bled out right there, laid across the
seat. The irony of us being in a lifeboat, as in life and boat, wasn’t lost
on anyone, and so we wrapped The Captain in some tarpaulin, which we
weren’t even sure we could spare, and sent him down to the sharks. None
of us had liked The Captain much but we all stood heads a-bowed when
Stamford, who had a thing about the Good Book, said some words.
Then we turned our attention towards The Rooster.
He’d been trussed up by Hawkeye, and then Hawkeye and Grumps
and even Stamford, who had a thing about the Good Book, had laid into
him good and proper. The Rooster was lying on his side groaning like
an old sailing schooner. They’d fashioned a gag from a piece of grubby
textile. The Rooster’s pompadour was all matted up and some blood was
trickling out of his nose and he kept sniffing. And then Hawkeye said,
‘Throw him overboard.’
‘Whoa, way, woo,’ I said, trying to steady myself as the boat danced.
‘We can’t just go throwing-’
‘Why not?’ sneered Hawkeye. ‘Yeah, why not?’ sneered Grumps,
and Stamford, who had a thing for the Good Book, started quoting
something I guess came out of it.
‘Well, because,’ I said, struggling for words, and struggling because,
face it, I was talking to Hawkeye and Grumps and Stamford, and even
before we were in this predicament I avoided conversation with Hawkeye
and Grumps and Stamford.
‘Now boys,’ said The Old Man, moving slightly to the centre of the
boat, which made it stir even more, ‘just listen boys, we can’t go throwing
people overboard just because… well, just because.’
Hawkeye stood there, bolt straight, staring right into The Old Man,

90
whose trousers were now affixed because he had his belt back. Hawkeye
was, what, two hundred and thirty pounds, broad shouldered, fists like
lump hammers. Five days in the boat had hardly shrunk him but he had
this big ridge of a blister running along his lower lip, which looked like it
would hurt like the devil whenever he went to speak. ‘Hey,’ Hawkeye said.
‘You saw what he did, he took The Captain with him, and now-’
‘And now we really got trouble,’ said Grumps, as if being in that boat,
in that ocean, at that time, wasn’t already a poser of a problem.
‘Yeah, but,’ The Old Man started saying, and then held his hands out
and said, ‘Look maybe we should just all sit down.’
So, we all sat down. There was Hawkeye flanked by Grumps and
Stamford on the starboard side, and me and The Old Man a-port, and
The Rooster trussed up on the floor, and The Kid sitting astern, knees
drawn up, arms folded, head down, shivering.
And then Hawkeye said, stretching that blister to bleeding point, ‘We
vote on it.’
And there we sat, blinking the sunlight out of our eyes, silence aside
from waves kissing wood and a shark’s back breaking the surface, and
eventually I said. ‘So what exactly are we voting on?’
Hawkeye leaned forward onto his knees, drew back his lips, and I
swear I heard the skin open. ‘Simple,’ he said. ‘The vote is, we throw The
Rooster over the side, or we don’t. But remember,’ he lifted a muscle-
bound right arm and pointed a finger, ‘If we don’t then we got to look
after him, and I’m not looking after him.’
‘Me neither,’ said Grumps, and then, like he was a boat-borne
Archimedes, went, ‘And don’t forget it’s what he wanted in the first place.
And, plus, he’s dangerous, and, and, we should-’
‘Really,’ I said, and tried to explain that The Rooster was most likely
suffering from severe dehydration and was in all probability not in
sound enough mind for his actions to be held accountable in any court of
law.
‘We aren’t in a court of law,’ hissed Hawkeye. And Stamford, who had
a thing about the Good Book, went to quoting some passage or other
which I’m sure none of us got to understand the pertinence of. Hawkeye
and Grumps grumbled in agreement, and I really fixed on Stamford,
his beard all matted with sweat and framing a face all ruddy, all fiery
even, like something diabolical, like something out of that book he kept
quoting, and I started thinking, ‘He’s next to go.’
But then The Kid said something. He lifted his head off his arms, off
his knees, and said, ‘He gave it to me.’
91
 ‘Huh?’ kind of said everyone.
‘His water,’ The Kid said, voice a little creaky. ‘He gave me his water. All
of it.’
‘Yeah, well so what?’ said Hawkeye, stiffening. ‘That was then. Before
the deed, what’s the legal word?’
‘A priori,’ said Stamford, and then muttered something more and
more in Latin or some such tongue.
‘Right,’ said Hawkeye, standing. ‘And with The Rooster gone, there’s
more water for everyone. Ok, we vote.’ He drew himself up and put his
hands on his hips. ‘So, who votes to deal with The Rooster?’ Hawkeye
and Grumps and Stamford, still sweating, still muttering, raised
hands. ‘That’s three,’ Hawkeye said, casting his eye, grinning, lip blister
stretching, bead of blood oozing out.
‘Yeah,’ I said, squinting up at him. ‘Who votes no?’ Me and The
Old Man and The Kid raised hands. ‘Three apiece,’ said The Old Man,
appending a loud ‘ha’.
‘Kid don’t count,’ said Hawkeye, sitting back down. ‘No, he doesn’t
count,’ wheezed Grumps through clenched teeth. I noticed he’d been
staring at the water container, by The Old Man’s feet, under the shade
thrown by the seat, his tongue tracing figures over and around his
mouth. ‘He don’t count because he’s not old enough to vote,’ said
Hawkeye, tensing his neck and shoulders.
‘Now wait a moment,’ The Old Man said, starting to lurch up out of his
sit, until I reached my hand onto his shoulder, easing him back into it,
and, keeping my calm, explaining that, shoot, we were all in that boat, in
that fix, and therefore any decision made democratically had to be with
the consent of everyone.
‘Not kids,’ said Hawkeye. He tensed again, formed his hands into
hammer-like fists, as did Grumps, who was not much slighter or lighter,
and Stamford, well, he was starting to babble.
‘OK,’ I said. ‘So if The Kid can’t vote, what about The Rooster?’
Hawkeye and Grumps laughed and shook their heads. A wave tossed
the boat. We all moved a tad. Up and down. Everything then settled.
Our gazes met, me and Hawkeye’s. I heard The Rooster groan, The Kid
shiver. Hawkeye said slowly, firmly, deliberately, that prisoners don’t
get a say. Hawkeye’s fists were now clenched out in front of him, like
he was assuming a fighting stance, albeit seated. I stared down at The
Rooster, blood still trickling from his wounded snout, and his eyes at
once pleading, and yet, not pleading, like they were resigned, like they
didn’t want it but knew it was coming. Like we all know the end of days is
92
coming no matter what we do, what we believe, what we don’t.
And Hawkeye said, ‘So who’s gonna do it?’
‘Huh?’ said The Old Man. ‘You voted for-’
‘We didn’t vote to throw him out, only that he should be throwed out,’
rasped Grumps.
‘So who’s gonna do it?’ said Hawkeye, every word marked with
emphasis. ‘Who?’
And then The Old Man moved with a fluidity I’d not have given him
credit for, and he was holding the water container and holding it out
over the side and threatening to ditch it and everything in it, if anyone
moved, and moved towards The Rooster, and he was shouting with a
vehemence I’d not have given him credit for either, and The Kid was
suddenly up and mouthing support, and Hawkeye and Grumps were
up and wanting to jump The Old Man, but not daring to jump The Old
Man and urging him to calm it and to think about it and to remember
that that water was all the water that we had, and I was looking at The
Rooster, whose eyes were closed tight and the boat was rocking, a lot, and
then Stamford rose and, above all others, said, with a voice like it came
from the most thunderous of skies, ‘Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees,
hypocrites, because you travel around on sea and land to make one
proselyte,’ and raising his hands and looking skyward, despite the harsh
sun’s blistering power, went on, ‘and when he becomes one, you make
him twice as much a son of hell as yourselves.’
And they did.
And then it stopped. And all of it. And we each stood affixed. And
ready. Breathing. The only sound being the waves kissing wood. And the
sharks smiling.

93
 CRITICAL

94
Plasticising the Biogea; or, Earthly Life in the
Anthropocene — Eline Tabak

1. The Age of Plastic

I think back to the first time I was aware of the destructibility of plastics,
and of its importance in a plasticised world. At primary school, the
teachers told us not to litter the environment because the cheap plastic
bottles and packages of our lunches and snacks could take up to five or
fifteen years to decompose. As an undergraduate student, I read Roland
Barthes’ judgement of the material: ‘in essence the stuff of alchemy’, he
called it, and ‘a miraculous substance’ (97). Today, our teachers’ warnings
have turned out to be wrong and I question Barthes’ wisdom on plastics’
miraculous qualities. Research has shown that the average time for
plastic to decompose is 450 years, while some plastic materials take up
to a 1000 years to biodegrade, and PET (Polyethylene Terephthalate)
will never decompose. Since the 1950s, production went up and human-
made sediments are increasing in size, influence, and danger. In fact, the
production and litter of plastic has reached such a level that, together
with materials such as concrete and aluminium, it has become one of
the markers of the Anthropocene, officially leaving the epoch of the
Holocene behind (Waters et al. 137-48). Plastic, it turns out, is here to
stay and with over 500 million tonnes of plastic produced every year,
humans are slowly covering the environment with it. In fact, plastic
covers all of Earth: not only the streets, rubbish dumps, and the ocean
tops; but it is also in our food, frozen in Arctic sea ice, and the deepest
parts of the ocean floors (Zalasiewicz et al. 3-38). While perhaps not ideal,
plastic is an inescapable part of Earth’s current geological epoch, the
Anthropocene.
In one of his latest books, Biogea (2012), Michel Serres is deeply
sceptical of this permanent change to Earth and praises natural
life—the Biogea. Serres asks for philosophers and people to think like
and communicate with the Biogea, which he describes as both the
accumulation of ‘Earth and life’ and a ‘victim’ of humanity, and preserve
its many forms and lives (23). The Biogea, then, is the entirety of earthly
life, or rather the earth alive. It is not merely the accumulation of flora
and fauna, but also the wind, rivers, and oceans. While rethinking
earthly life, Serres also keeps it separate from human life. Human
settlements, like cities, are absent of the Biogea. While extremely critical

95
of humanity’s destructive ways, Serres does not seem to acknowledge
the permanent extent of humanity’s production of plastic on Earth:
that which I will name the plasticising of the Biogea. Rather than being
“trashcan-Earth” (32), something to be filled and then thrown away, these
new materials have become a permanent fixture and cannot be thrown
away: Earth and life and plasticity. In that light, this paper offers a look
in the world with plastic and a re-reading of Serres’ Biogea—or perhaps
the Biogea itself—in terms of plasticity. In the Anthropocene, the Biogea
is no longer the pure accumulation of earthly life, but now also includes
plastic and other human waste in its earthly cycles, its grounds, its
airs, and its waters. In short, the Biogea has become plasticised. While
this addition to the Biogea is often seen in a negative light—pollution,
appropriation, death—it has to be accepted that the consequences of
this plasticity will not last five or fifteen years. Plastic has become part
of the Biogea, part of the cycles of earthly life, and part of that with
which humanity and all other life on Earth communicates. In this essay,
I will outline the three stages of plasticising the Biogea, beginning with
pollution, moving on to adaptation, and ending with participation,
in which the against becomes a with and for and the Biogea becomes
plasticised.

2. Pollution

A woman walks on the beach in Oahu, Hawaii. Part of an organisation

that aims to manage, protect, and restore the native ecosystems of
Oahu, she often walks these beaches to look at the state of the island’s
ecosystem and its native birds. Today, the woman finds a dead Laysan
Albatross fledgling. It is not the first one she found and she knows
it will not be the last one. The autopsy shows that the fledgling had
ingested a large amount of plastic, which—while the scientists do not
dare to declare this with absolute certainty—is the likely reason for
the fledgling’s death. The macroscopic fragments of plastic found in
the bird’s stomach are numerous: while some fragments are not easy
to identify, a cursory look reveals the bird to have swallows several
bottle caps, three or four lighters, plastic pins, and one toothbrush. The
albatross is a large bird and their fledglings are no smaller. The woman
wonders: did this fledgling die of malnutrition and starvation, the result
of having a full stomach without any actual food in it? Did it choke
on such fragments that cannot be properly broken down into smaller
pieces, or was it perhaps poisoned by the toxic substances it digested?
96
It is difficult to tell once the bird has already died. One thing is certain:
with more plastic circulating in the oceans’ currents and more birds
eating it and consequently dying, the problem is larger than this single
Albatross fledgling. The woman, Dr Cynthia Vanderlip, carefully places
the contents of the fledgling’s stomach next to each other, photographs
it, and continues with her research, thinking about what she can do to
manage, protect, and restore (see fig. 1).
The Laysan albatross is not the only animal victim to the plastic
pollution on Earth. Ecosystems are changing because of the pollution
and digestion of macroscopic fragments and microscopic particles
of plastic (Barnes et al. 1994). With over 160 species of birds dying
after ingesting macroscopic fragments of plastic the total amount of
birds falling victim to oceanic pollution is larger than the number of
albatrosses found on Oahu.

Fig 1. This photograph shows a dead albatross fledgling and the contents of its stomach.
Photo courtesy of Duncan Wright/The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

Besides that, cetaceans such as dolphins and whales have also

been known to ingest plastic or become entangled in it. In the early
nineties, the story of a small turtle named Peanut circled around the
world. The turtle had gotten stuck in the plastic ring of a six-pack
holder and could not get out. For the next decade or so, she continued
to grow and her shield formed around the plastic ring, resulting in her
the odd peanut-shaped shield. While this specific turtle survived the
ordeal, such deformities not only affect the shield but also the growth
of organs and she could have just as easily died. Coral, too, is the victim
97
of plastic pollution. Research on the Great Barrier Reef in Australia has
shown that the corals eat microscopic particles, including polystyrene
and polyethylene (Hall, et al. 725-32). Unable to digest these particles,
they stay inside of the corals and permanently change these marine
invertebrates. While the full effect is as of yet unknown, it is undeniable
that plastic has become a permanent fixture of marine life in the Great
Barrier Reef.
While plastics are certainly not the only way of polluting and
consequently murdering our surrounding nature, it is a form of pollution
that not only most clearly speaks to the human imagination, but also
communicates with us as part of the Biogea. For most humans, plastic
is a part of every-day life. The bottle caps and toothbrushes thrown into
the oceans are items that we, too, use in daily life; plastic bottles are
thrown away by us, often on a daily basis. Serres compares the force of
humanity, of us, in doing this violence upon the Biogea with tectonic
plates: at the core of major changes are the ‘enormous and dense tectonic
plates of humanity’ (The Natural Contract 17). It is not individuals, but
the human race in its entirety turning Earth into hell with its careless
pollution, plasticising the Biogea:

Subjects, we pave the world, I mean hell, with objects, named thus
by us because thrown before us, rejected, better, disposable:
trashcan-Earth, polluted air, dead seas, factory farmed fowl, feet
welded into the cement, an unclean world, sewage fields, soiled by
us for us to appropriate them. (Biogea 32)

By polluting Earth, says Serres, we not only turn it into hell, we

appropriate it and make it ours like a wild animal pissing on the
ground it intends to claim as its own—a form of communication of
animal origin. In Malfeasance: Appropriation through Pollution? (2010),
Serres distinguishes between two kinds of pollution: the first one, hard
appropriation, is the act of polluting the environment and making it ours
by contamination; the second one, soft appropriation, contains forms of
advertising, signs and words, that intend to claim the earth, too (41-42).
After all, even ‘sustainable development serves as deceptive advertising
for [humans] to finish the plundering’ (Biogea 192). How, then, does the
plasticised Biogea communicate back to us?
Like all the other “things of the world”, plastics, too, speak in
the Biogea. Not only are plastics made of earthly materials, but the
macroscopic fragments and microscopic particles also become part of
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the chattering of things. In Biogea, Serres speaks of the
water that, although ever-changing in place and material form, never
leaves Earth. The water—as the river Garonne, as the rain, or as the
oceans’ currents—are all part of the Biogea’s voice. Likewise, earth and
fire and air move through the world and continue to speak: “Everything
speaks.” Then why should pollution, not the act but the hard materials
through which we appropriate the natural world, not have a voice as
well? While man-made, plastics, created from crude oil and natural
gases, moves and changes through the world. Like the evaporating
rivers, the melting ice, and the mountains that become sand through
the centuries, plastics, too, change shape and substance—but never are
we left with more or less atoms than before. As such, that which gives
voice to the earthly elements is also present in plastics. It follows that,
the plastics that live in the ocean, too, join in the chatter of the collective
Biogea: the plastic fragments that are found in the albatross fledgling
speak, the plastic stuck and removed around the young turtle, the
microscopic particles floating around the Great Barrier Reef and eaten
by corals. Like the sea, the birds, the turtles, and the corals themselves,
these plastics join the chorus of the Biogea and sing to us. This does not
mean, however, that it is a positive message given to us. Like the ailing
rivers cry out for help, these plastics give a message when they are found:
they do not belong. While plastics have become a permanent fixture on
this planet, this does not imply that they should just be left everywhere,
killing animals and other natural phenomena. In the same way that
Serres discusses both hard and soft forms of pollution and
appropriation, part of the plasticised Biogea, these plastic speak back
and against those who pollute. Hard, in their material forms; soft, in
the photographs and stories that convey their voices and messages—a
translation of an unfamiliar language. Through pollution, the plastics
of the Biogea and the Biogea are themselves communicating with
humanity. How to speak it? A woman walks on the beach in Oahu,
Hawaii. She comes across a dead Laysan Albatross fledgling, looks at the
plastic contents of its stomach, and shares its message with the world.
Plastic is speaking.

3. Adaptation

A hermit crab walks on the beach in Zeeland, The Netherlands. Its body
has grown too large for its previous shell and it is looking for a new one
to protect is soft abdomen. Normally, the hermit crab would go look for
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an abandoned gastropod shell or a bigger crab that has outgrown its own
shell, leaving it for his fellow crabs to form a line and all move into a
slightly bigger shell. Today, the hermit crab is unable to find a gastropod
shell or another crab that has decided to leave his shell for another to
wear. Fortunately for the crab, the beach is filled with more than sand,
pebbles, seaweed, and empty gastropod shells. After looking for a long
time, the hermit crab finally sees something he can crawl in to protect
his soft body. The next day, two people are walking on the same beach.
They are looking for periwinkles and cockles to eat in the evening. With
their feet half-way in the water, they suddenly see a plastic bottle cap. It
is moving. When they decide to take a closer look. They see that there is
a hermit crab in the cap, using the plastic to protect its body from harm
as long as it does not find a new and bigger shell to move to. One of the
people takes a picture of the crab with their phone and puts in on the
internet that same evening, where the picture circulates around their
friends, and later the world (see fig. 2). The responses to the image are
mixed: on the hand people see it as a sign of the polluted ocean, on the
other hand they are happy to see the hermit crab live for another day.
Back on the beach, the hermit crab does not care. It continues to do what
it always does: eat, find protection, procreate, and survive.

Fig 2. This photograph shows a small hermit crab that decided to live in a toothpaste
bottle after it could not find a new shell to live in. Photo courtesy of Reddit user
HScmidt/Imgur.

The hermit crab is not the only animal that has learnt to adapt
in a plasticised world. Eurasian coots have been using plastics as part
of their nests for a while: straws and plastic ribbons are used the same

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way as twigs and other natural resources. Do these plastics have an
insulating factor in their nests or are the coots not aware of what they
are using? Deeper in the open waters, there are plastic island forming.
They are made of buoys, nets, bottles, and other macroscopic fragments
of plastic. On one of these islands, researchers have identified what they
call beaches, a rocky coastline, and reefs. Animals like mussels, sea
anemones, and clams have been found on these islands, not to mention
the seaweed that gets stuck and continues to grow. Other researchers
have found ‘bryozoans, barnacles, a worm, an Asellota isopod, and eggs
of the sea-skating insect Halobates’ amongst the other plastic-dwellers
in the oceans (Reisser and Pattiaratchi, n.p.). Slowly, animal life is
adapting and using plastic to continue their life on earth, water, and the
sky. And this does not include what the future might bring: a group of
Dutch architects has plans to build a “Plastic Island” with the plastics
now floating around in the oceans. While humans may be planning on
cleaning up the ocean, the incredible amount of plastic in the oceans
cannot simply be thrown away nor decompose within the time humans
want to get rid of it: creating a new inhabitable island might a way to
adapt. Furthermore, the value of plastics is not limited to survival: crows
have been giving the stuff as gifts to people for years, showing gratitude
and affection to those who have shown kindness in return. For these
animals, like humans, plastic has gained a social value that goes beyond
death or survival.
While Serres often mentions the adaptivity of the microbes and
living things in the Biogea, this adaptive quality does not appear to go
beyond microbes, tree branches, and other phenomena in earthly life.
Instead, the four classic elements and nonhuman nature only appear to
adapt themselves to the sound and feel of each other:

[E]very fragile breeze induces this oak branch to provoke a

response from that linden twig, trembling and adapted to it.
They listen to each other like no human couple ever spoke to one
another. Yes, the sciences are beginning to discover it, the trees
themselves emit voices. (Biogea 133)

While humanity is slowly discovering the joined voices of the

Biogea, speaking and singing to each other and to humans alike,
Serres does not look or hear further than that. As such, neither does
Serres talk of the human body adapting to new sounds, the plasticised
Biogea, entering the chorus of the Biogea. Instead, only the human
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body—a sensitive seismograph—adapts itself to the trembling of the
natural earth. Serres talks of how the trembling branches of the tree
respond to every breath of air that caresses it; but not of how the Biogea
itself, seen in the lives of hermit crabs, Eurasian coots, and the slow
formation of habitable plastic islands, responds to the plasticising of the
world. In Malfeasance, he called it pollution: hard appropriation of the
natural world surrounding us. Yet, when you look at how these animals
are slowly adapting their own lifestyles and even incorporate plastics
into their social lives, how can you deny that earth is slowly adapting
into a plasticised Biogea? The question that follows is, how do these
animals and these changing events speak to us?
I want to focus on one specific event, or to be more specific, the
event that initiated something else: the plastic island in the oceans,
now home to numerous single-celled organisms, seaweeds, and other
animals. It has been speculated that the plastic islands in the oceans
have formed after the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami. A natural
disaster that caused thousands of deaths, left even more people without
fresh water or a home, and was the cause of Japan’s nuclear power plants
to leak radioactive waste. According to Serres, ‘society can be accused’
(Biogea 29). But when is society accused? When it does not listen to the
Biogea? While humanity moves in destructive collectives, as powerful
as the tectonic plates that caused this natural disaster, listening to the
Biogea could not have prevented this disaster. The people that were
killed were already there; the people left without water and a home to
return to were already there; and the nuclear plant was already there,
too. My suggestion is as follows, if the body start to think like the earth
and the ocean after experiencing such a natural power and witnessing
the Biogea speak, it is time to listen to the Biogea after these events have
happened. What happened is this: after the earthquake struck and the
tsunami hit the island of Japan, the water and waves took from the land
and added to that which was already in the ocean. Out of this the oceans
created plastic island, each a newly formed separate part of the Biogea,
and eventually home to other life forms. Slowly, nature is adapting to the
plastics in the oceans and has started to make its own new life forms. I
listen to the Biogea, think like the ocean, and follow the water’s eddies: it
is time to create life out of that which has been so carelessly abandoned.
Humanity’s hard appropriation is being appropriated in return.

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4. Participation

A tourist washes his face with a face scrub after shaving. The scrub
contains microscopic plastic particles, or microbeads, for the highest
effect. After washing his face, the man drains the foam in his sink and
after a long journey the microbeads end up in the open water of the
ocean. After drifting and accumulating in the ocean, a school of fish
appears and they eat the microbeads without knowing. This is not the
first time these fish ingest plastic particles, but they remain unaware.
Eventually, after days, a group of fishermen captures the fish and, with
their nets full, they move back to the land. The fish, still filled with
microbeads, are displayed at the fishermen’s local market before they
are sold to a man, a cook at a nearby hotel. Unlike the albatross fledgling,
the microbeads are too small and have not been in the fish nearly long
enough for the fish to starve. The microbeads are too small for the fish
to look unhealthy and for the people to notice. Unaware of the plastics
in both the ocean and the fish, the cook prepares the food and serves
it to the hotel’s guests. The same tourist who uses a scrub every other
day to wash his face, orders the fish that evening and the same type of
microbeads that he washes off his face in the morning end up in his
body hours later. This time, the movement and effect of plastics on the
environment are not photographed and shared with the world as they
happen. Instead, it takes scientists and researchers months and years
to figure out and capture the movement of microscopic plastic particles
and their effect on the beings that ingest them: corals, fish, and humans.
In the meantime, they all continue what they do in order to live: eat, find
protection, procreate, and survive.
In the beginning, plastic was praised as a miraculous substance,
and it cannot be denied that humanity has found multiple uses for it.
After some decades, however, it turned out to be less than ideal. While
humanity first thought that burying their plastic waste in the oceans
would make it disappear, the opposite turned out to be true: through
microplastic particles these plastics are slowly returning to the land, and
the land itself is changing accordingly. They are in our waters, in the fish
and other animals we eat, and are slowly becoming part of humanity as
well like small single-celled organisms living inside our bodies. These
microbeads, however, are not the first-time plastics have become parts
of human and nonhuman bodies. Plastic prostheses have been used for
decades and continue to be created and used: not just as an extension of
the body, an arm or a leg, but also inside the body, as joints, disks, and
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eyes. Plasticised humanity. How, then, does the land adapt to these new
materials? A new sediment has been created and discovered:

[P]lastiglomerate [describes] an indurated, multi-composite

material made hard by agglutination of rock and molten
plastic. This material is subdivided into an in situ type, in which
plastic is adhered to rock outcrops, and a clastic type, in which
combinations of basalt, coral, shells, and local woody debris are
cemented with grains of sand in a plastic matrix[.] (Corcoran,
Moore, and Jazvac 5-6)

With the discovery of plastiglomerate (see fig. 3) being relatively recent,

future uses of the new sediment are as of yet unclear. It does, however,
show that plastics are once more turned into something other than
humanity intended it to be: formed into a new sediment, together with
other earthly materials such as sand, wood, and shells, it becomes
something new entirely. Adding to and participating in the Biogea,
plastiglomerate speaks to us in a chorus of new voices.

Fig 3. Plastic pollution that might one day be part of the sediment plastiglomerate. Photo
courtesy of user bilyjan on Pixabay.

Earthly life in the Anthropocene has slowly becoming plasticised, yet

plastics are not yet considered to be part of the Biogea. Near the end of
Biogea, Serres calls for humanity to look at the wholly other in a different
way, not as enemies but as “symbionts” or “mutualists”:

I propose considering the other, wholly other, the other

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 humans, but also every being in the Biogea, neither as rivals in a
race that the human animal wins but is going to end by losing, nor
as enemies in battle, but as symbionts or mutualists: no more war
to the death, rather exchanges of reciprocal services. How can the
against change into for or with? (170)

First, I want to take a look at what Serres refers to as the “wholly other”.
All beings in the Biogea are wholly other, tout-autres, not part of our being
and doing: the rivers, the oceans, the earth, the animals, and microbes.
This is why, when listening to the Biogea, one can speak like the earth, but
not of the earth without doing violence unto it. Earlier, Serres refers to
the other as something that cannot be encountered with any specialised
language, such as that of scholars in science. When something is wholly
other, it cannot be captured in our own subjective language and views.
Instead, academia’s specialised languages cause humans to speak in
“dislocated terms” of those who are wholly other (74). Second, Serres
explicitly states that we should not look at this wholly other as either a
rival or enemy. Looking at Malfeasance, the wholly ther is considered a
rival whom, together with its living space, we overpower and subjugate
with pollution, our aggressive ‘will to appropriate, our desire to conquer
and expand the space of our properties’ (42). As long as plastics and the
plasticising of earthly life can only be viewed in terms of pollution and
thus appropriation, the against can never turn into a for or with.
And yet, the Anthropocene, defined by the ways which humanity
has changed biogeophysical aspects of this Earth such as the new
sediment plastiglomerate, is unthinkable without plastics. Perhaps once
no more than an agent of hard appropriation, plastic is participating
in the Biogea. And like the river and microbes, it speaks to us. The
microscopic particles of plastic in both animal and fish speak of the
inevitability of plasticised life; new sediments such as plastiglomerate
talk of new possibilities, and the plastic islands formed by litter and
the oceans’ currents send out signals that it is time to change the way
plastics functions on Earth. Like earthquakes and rivers, you have
to stand still, encounter and experience, and think like these new
participants in the Biogea. Rather than looking at plastics like the enemy,
or devourers of ‘earthly capital, hard, accumulated over millions of years’
(Biogea 192), these too have to be seen as symbionts or mutualists. Like
the sand coming from the mountains and the rain forming out of open
waters, both the accumulation of millions of years on Earth, plastics
are the transformed products of atoms that have been part of earthly
105
life since the beginning. And they will be part of Earth for 450, 1000 or
endless years to come. The plasticised Biogea is joined by a plasticised
humanity: it is a shared experience, encounter between man, earthly life,
and plastic. Part of nature, humanity, and the Biogea itself, it is time to
start listening to the complete world around us, and change the against
into a for or with.

5. The plasticised Biogea

As a child I was taught not to litter because the cheap plastic bottles and
packages of our lunches and snacks could take up to five or fifteen years
to decompose. These days, however, I know it takes centuries longer than
previously thought and I mostly worry with questions as to the purpose
of it all. Humanity, as powerful as shifting tectonic plates and just as
deadly, has created a new—its own—geological epoch. With billions
of plastics littering the environment, does it matter whether or not I
use one more plastic bottle or bag and add it to the ever-growing pile
in my streets, my oceans, and my planet? Looking at the ways plastics
are moving in the world—adapting and participating—I revaluate my
previous concerns and say yes. The world can and is already living and
communicating with plastics: the plasticised Biogea. Following this, one
distinction I have hinted at, but have yet to make is the following: are
plastics themselves communicating with the Biogea and the other way
around, or is humanity now communicating with and encountering a
plasticised Biogea? I believe both are happening as we speak. On the one
hand, animals and nature alike have been using plastics as means to
survive, communicate, and build save homes. Natural disasters, such as
the tsunami, and other sea currents have made habitable plastic islands
of what once was seen as hard pollution. The sea itself communicates
adapts and adjusts itself, producing a message of change. On the other
hand, plastics are becoming part of more natural phenomena, such as
the seas, once more these plastic islands, and both humans and animals:
life on Earth has become plasticised. Rather than against, plastics are
working with and for their natural environment.
Then how to define the plasticised Biogea? In Malfeasance,
Serres defines hard pollution, in this case the littering of plastics
across the globe, as the aggressive manifestation of our human will to
appropriate nature and make everything ours. Human life and human
violence against the Biogea. However, now that plastics have become an
irrevocable part of earthly life in the Anthropocene, it is time to look at
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what Barthes once called a “miraculous substance” from an affirmative
angle. In this current day and age, plastics are everywhere, more often
than not causing unimaginable pollution and destruction. However,
there are alternatives to the ways plastics can be used and thus become
part of earthly life. Humans themselves are already doing just that:
recycling plastics, using them to isolate sustainable houses, designing a
habitable island of the stuff. Animals, too, are recycling the plastics we
have left in their habitats, using it to create save homes and nests, and
even sustain social relations. The plasticised Biogea is the sum of the
world, only with plastics. Or rather, plastics are with and for the world.
Similarly, the outside has become an in: that which was first working
against nonhuman life, and then against both human and nonhuman
life, once more has the potential to become part of our lives as long
as we listen to what it has been speaking to us all along. Still wholly
other, but no longer appropriating and destructive. Only by allowing
ourselves to be completely open and be opened up, can we continue
life in the Anthropocene. The plasticised Biogea, or earthly life in the
Anthropocene, lives, resonates, bells and howls in its wholeness. It is
time to start listening.

107
Works Cited

Barnes, David K. A., et al. ‘Accumulation and Fragmentation of Plastic

Debris in Global Environments.’ Philosophical Transactions of Royal
Society B 364.1526 (2009): 1985-98.

Barthes, Roland. ‘Plastic.’ Mythologies. Trans. Annette Lavers. New York:

Noonday Press, 1991. 97-99.

Corcoran, Patricia L., Charles J. Moore, and Kelly Jazvac. ‘An

Anthropogenic Marker Horizon in the Future Rock Record.’ GSA
Today 24.6 (2013): 4-8.

Hall, N.M., et al. ‘Microplastic Ingestion by Scleractinian Corals.’ Marine

Biology 162.3 (2015): 725-32.

Reisser, Julia, and Charitha Pattiaratchi. ‘Creatures Living on Tiny Ocean

Plastic May Be Cleaning our Seas.’ The Conversation. 18 June 2014.
<http://theconversation.com/creatures-living-on-tiny-ocean-
plastic-may-be-cleaning-our-seas-27876> [accessed on 25 January
2016]

Serres, Michel. Biogea. Trans. Randolph Burks. Minneapolis: Univocal

Publishing, 2012.
---. Malfeasance: Appropriation Through Pollution? Trans. Anne-Marie
Feenberg-Dibon. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2010.
---. The Natural Contract. Trans. Elizabeth MacArthur and William
Paulson. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995.

Waters, Colin N., et al. ‘The Anthropocene is Functionally and

Stratigraphically Distinct from the Holocene.’ Science 351.6269
(2016): 137-48.

Zalasiewicz, Jan, et al. ‘The Geological Cycle of Plastics and their use as
a Stratigraphic Indicator of the Anthropocene.’ Anthropocene 13
(2016): 1-38.

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REVIEWS

109
Poems of generosity find their time – Oliver Webb

Slakki: New & Neglected Poems

Roy Fisher
(80 pp., £9.95, Bloodaxe Books (2016))

The title of Roy Fisher’s 2010 collection Standard Midland refers to a

certain ‘plain way of talking’ located firmly in his home Midlands. Such
a description of Fisher’s poetry seems apt. And perhaps the defining
mark of this plainness is that it never slips into cold detachment
or an emotionally stunted stoicism. When he refers to the neglect
referenced in the title of Slakki: New & Neglected Poems as ‘entirely mine’,
he takes responsibility for what becomes a thematic concern, whilst
simultaneously expressing it as a given; it could not possibly be the fault
of ‘publishers, editors or reviewers’ as ‘my work always seems to me to
have had as much attention as it deserved or was likely to get.’ That those
neglected poems ‘lacked a stable self’, one ‘responsible for it and to it’,
lingers in the reading. As to why they now find themselves published,
Fisher, aside from his plain talking, does not explicitly disclose this.
Instead, the three sections—comprised of the new, and the neglected
from the 1960s and the 1950s respectively—are open to develop their
own thread under the watchful eye of long-time editor Peter Robinson.
If earlier poems echo William Carlos Williams’ intimate
attention to images, “Bench”, from the selection of new poems, invokes
his spirit readily: ‘No ideas/but in mixtures, suspensions, conglomerates,
slags/in variety’. The reference receives a reworking, adding a caveat of
complication and adding richness. This new selection also reflects on age
both here—‘With my time in my eye/an honorific ode’s not on/for one so
young, so I’ll give you a piece of my mind’—and in “1941”, arguably the
most direct of the new poems—‘with the bomb-shot windows hanging
loose/and the useful part of my education completed’. This sense of the
‘stable self’ that Fisher recognises as crucial is vivid here. “Sky Work”
demonstrates once more Fisher’s vigilance, an affectionate portrayal
of the sky under perception: ‘For me in particular it carves itself alive/
into oblongs and squares that stretch/to fit windows exactly’. Whilst an
anthropomorphic act, it bears a yearning idealism: ‘ Without/feelings of

110
its own it labours to match/whatever moods may float up…It won’t rest’.
One of the longest from section “Two”, “Abraham Darby’s
Bridge”, is an act of deliberate agitation, beginning ‘Forget the
masterpiece itself:/it cracks with watching’, before deliberating on said
masterpiece. Sustained by a soon-to-be characteristic wit and attention,
several passages are all the better for being read aloud, displaying an
acute awareness to how the poem sounds - ‘with gardens and hovels/
collapsed into peace,/patched with fresh mortar,/with fresh cinders’.
That this is balanced so effectively, not sacrificing image for the quality
of the spoken word nor vice versa, is a substantial achievement in itself.
In another highlight from this section, “Results” considers passivity and
the intimacy of exchanged glances, whilst in “Night Walkers” the poet
moves towards a more physically active language—‘There’s a smashed
box of wind in every street”…“Behind their glistening panes shaken with
blows’—to present the near perpetual motion of the city.
“Division of Labour” from section “Three” turns Fisher’s eye
again towards the landscape of the city, whilst the rich prose poem,
“The Doctor Died”, moves from image to image languidly, emphasising,
with consistent poise, colour and movement. “The Moral” stands out
here, perhaps due to Fisher’s aforementioned concern with the lack of
a singular voice. In spite of this, the poem displays both Fisher’s wit
and love of the leftfield metaphor that has become a trademark, even
in these early “neglected” works. Vigilance again seems critical, finding
beauty in inevitability—‘It was surely a portent’—as every character
is engulfed, some more actually than others—‘And all of the frog, who
knew perfectly well how to swim’.
It would be almost reflexive to assume a poet’s reasoning for
releasing poems excluded at the time of composition as due to a lack
of quality. Certainly, There are differences between the earliest works
of 1951 and 2016, but for there to not be would be more of a cause for
concern and the quality is certainly not lacking. What remains is a
phenomenological curiosity and the encouragement of an oft missing
intimacy which is handled generously and with dignity.

[Editor’s note: Roy Fisher died on the 21st March 2017, a month or so after
Oliver completed his review for us. In this interest of critical balance and
in the spirit in which we believe the author would want his work to be
read, we did not ask Oliver to revise his review after Fisher’s death.]

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Re-evaluations and Culminations - Harrison Sullivan

Poetry and the Anthropocene: Ecology, biology and technology in contemporary

British and Irish poetry
Sam Solnick
(238 pp., £78.39, Routledge (2016))

Sam Solnicks’s Poetry and the Anthropocene: Ecology, biology and technology
in contemporary British and Irish poetry proposes in the introduction, as the
subtitle to the book suggests, that ‘ecological thinking means engaging
with the feedbacks and relationships within and between the organic,
abiotic materials, the technological and the social’ (10). The introduction
goes further by suggesting that the poetics of the poets analysed, J.H.
Prynne, Derek Mahon and Ted Hughes, all possess a desire to change
‘communicative systems’ and ‘their impact human on thought and
behaviour’ (15). It is only through this that the ‘ecological function’ of
humanity’s impact on the planet can be addressed. This is framed as a
re-evaluation of previous ecocritical approaches, especially in the case
of Ted Hughes. Solnick sees a need to correct the aspects of his work that
have been ‘(mis)read or elided by both his many critics and staunchest
supporters’ (11). This re-evaluation is carried out through the critical
lens of the Anthropocene and in particular Timothy Clark’s work, such
as Ecocriticism on the Edge: The Anthropocene as a Threshold Concept (2015), in
which Anthropocene theory is used to disrupt ‘any sense of oneself as a
freely choosing rational individual’ (Solnick 41) in favour of an analysis
of systems that recognise humanities’ geological force.
This dense theoretical basis for the book is explored in depth
in its opening two chapters, ‘Introduction: Poetry and Science’ and
‘Evolving systems of (eco)poetry’. These chapters also chart the
approaches that Solnick takes for each poet. Ted Hughes’ rehabilitation
from ecocritical readings that remain too indebted to ‘Romantic
concepts of [a] human part within [an] organic whole’ (9) is carried
out through a broad engagement with his ‘vast correspondence’
and ‘campaigns’ which allow Solnick to uncover ‘his deceptively
sophisticated rendering of evolution and technology’ (11). Mahon’s
chapter in contrast elucidates the ways in which his ‘ironic ecology’,
which is identified as ‘liberal and humanist’ in contrast to the two
other poets, represents an anxiety about the ‘aesthetic or social retreats
into dwelling’ and away from nature (12). Finally Prynne’s embrace of

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‘complex relationships between humans, their environment(s) and the
technologies that impact them both’ (13) forms the basis for the final
section.
‘Evolving systems of (eco)poetry’ is notable not only for its
wide ranging and comprehensive account of ecocritical approaches
which spans Johnathan Bates and Lawrence Buell to James Lovelock’s
misguided Gaia Theory and present day work on the Anthropocene,
but also its engagement with British poetry. In particular, Solnick’s
discussion of experimental poetry (27-32) and Harriet Tarlo’s
terminology ‘radical landscape poetry’ is interesting. Solnick concludes
that this experimental poetics leads to a poetry that increasing lacks
‘environment engagement’ (31) and which results in ‘an insistence on
the local’ that could ‘stymie as well as facilitate global environmental
awareness’ (30). As such Solnick suggests that less experimental
poetics such as Hughes and Alice Oswald operate as a middle ground
that is able to take up both ‘phenomenological engagement and
environmentalism’ (31). In doing so Solnick is attempting to suggest
that “poetry and the Anthropocene” should not be limited to “poetry
about the Anthropocene”. There is a sense for Solnick that “non-radical”
poetries are able to more effectively bridge this gap. Solnick suggests
Systems theory as an approach should be taken up by theorists in order
to explore ‘why and how communication about ecology, biology and
technology might be affecting or (in)effective’ (57).
Solnick’s discussion of Hughes, ‘”Life subdued to its instrument”’,
analyses a wide breath of Hughes’ work, including his poems, letters
and the novels The Iron Man and The Iron Woman. These last two
examples are used to forward a Heideggerian argument that ‘while the
technological world cannot be abolished, it might be assimilated’ (100).
This is used to underline a reading of Hughes that focuses convincingly
on a ‘deep-ecological sense of species equality’ (82) and highlights the
‘mechanically mediated human desire which inscribes itself on the
body of the destroyed animal’ (83). This highlights the importance of
environmental causes to Hughes and his belief in his work as bases for
promoting them and playing ‘a significant role in adapting humans to
[…] environmental crisis’ (97).
In ‘“Germinal ironies”’, the fourth chapter, it is Mahon’s
‘foundational concern with linking the economic and social alongside
the spatial and ecological’ for Solnick that makes him the ‘interesting
contemporary Irish poet for exploring the Anthropocene’ (106). The
chapter charts, on the one hand, Mahon’s ‘refusal to fully invest himself
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in a concomitant guilty conscience at [his] failure to do or feel what he
“should”’ (106). And on the other hand, Mahon’s engagement with James
Lovelock’s Gaia theory (128) and the hyper connectedness of all things
that it implies. Solnick’s reading of Mahon investigates how through the
use of irony Mahon critiques the late-stage capitalist society that he is
implicated in. Solnick elucidates this as a poetry that ‘shuttles between
caustic satire, glib playfulness, hopeful ecorhapsody, visionary gloom,
faux naïve optimism and resign apocalypticism’ (127).
Solnick’s chapter on J.H. Prynne ‘The resistant materials of
Jeremy Prynne’ suggests the difficulty of Prynne’s work as stemming
from a ‘sense that many materials are, in significant ways, resistant to
human ways of knowing and doing’ (150). The chapter investigates the
difficulties which Prynne addresses in his poetry such as his ‘disgust
at some of the driving motivations behind biochemical research’ (176)
and ‘questions of temporality, plant biology and academic politics’
(168) which make up Prynne’s The Plant Time Manifold. This culminates
in a suggestion the Prynne’s indentification of resistance in things
like ‘biology or climate science’ or ‘pharmacology’ predictions reveal
a technological world that is resistant to the ‘anthropocentric (‘over-
humanized’) conceptualisation, commodification and, ultimately,
control’ (191).
There is a sense of apocalyptic inevitability that pervades
Solnick’s conclusion. The ‘human instruments’ which ‘risk extinguishing
large swathes of [life on earth]’ are given a vitalism, stemming from
Solnick’s reading of Prynne and his giving voice to “resistant materials”.
Solnick’s final suggestion is that ‘for too long readers have looked to
poetry primarily to understand how one might dwell in the world;
the point [...] is to change (with) it’ (211). This cannot help but take on a
fatalistic overtone in light of the human and non-human mass suffering
and death that the abstracted “change” will entail. This book shares
with the activist Hughes, the ironic Mahon, and perceptive Prynne
a convincing argument for poetry’s role in critiquing of the course
which has led to the Anthropocene, but that appears to be the limit of
poetry. It is not clear how we can come to terms with our complicity
in not just living in a world but having become a geological force that
will fundamentally damage life on it, let alone what “changing with”
that force would entail other than a human survivability that is almost
assured already.

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A Vast Empty Place – Matthew Carbery

Topophobia: A Phenomenology of Anxiety

Dylan Trigg
(211 pp., £19.79, Bloomsbury Publishing (2016))

Dylan Trigg’s work traces and retraces strangeness in its myriad forms.
It is also a body of work which is itself strange. His figures of interest
have included Emmanuel Levinas, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Gaston
Bachelard, Edmund Husserl, Quentin Meillassoux and Martin Heidegger
alongside literary and filmic figures such as John Carpenter, J.G. Ballard,
H.P Lovecraft, Stanley Kubrick, Werner Herzog, David Cronenberg and
David Lynch. Trigg’s ability to bring together the philosophical, the
filmic and the literary without trivialising any of the above makes him a
writer of great importance not only to the phenomenological tradition
but to contemporary thought more generally.
Indeed, Trigg’s measured discourse allows him to bridge
the often sizeable gap between popular culture and academia while
remaining rigorous in his investigation of the sources and symptoms
of the troubling existential themes of uncanniness, anxiety, horror and
memory. Together his four books- The Aesthetics of Decay, The Thing: A
Phenomenology of Horror, The Memory of Place: A Phenomenology of the Uncanny
and the latest, Topophobia: A Phenomenology of Anxiety- make a strong case
for the importance of bearing witness to strangeness as a phenomena as
it appears in its most striking forms.
In Topophobia, however, Trigg’s writing takes a new emphasis. It is
as much a work of phenomenology as it is a work about phenomenology.
That said, Trigg does not expend unnecessary time and space with
deferential discussions of the history of phenomenology. True to
the nature of the epoché, he begins in medias res, at once developing a
thesis and exposing his writing—and his audience— to the vicissitudes
of contingency, the strangeness of nowness. Grounded in his own
subjective experience of debilitating anxiety, the existential modality in
question in Topophobia is that of the Agoraphobe. Through painstakingly
detailed recreations of anxiety attacks, Trigg offers the reader a tour
of particular locations– mostly within Paris– from the agoraphobe’s
perspective, using these as the foundations for his meditations on
anxious being.

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              In this sense, Trigg’s writing begins to emulate some of the more
unusual moments of Merleau-Ponty’s early work, such as Phenomenology
of Perception. In the chapter ‘The Cogito’, Merleau-Ponty turns to his own
direct present-tense experience in order to illustrate the
phenomenological process:
I am thinking of the Cartesian cogito, wanting to finish this work,
feeling the coolness of the paper under my hand, and perceiving
the trees of the boulevard through the window. My life is con-
stantly thrown headlong into transcendent things, and passes
wholly outside me. (Phenomenology of Perception [2016], 369)

The question of verisimilitude underpinning this passage speaks of a

more general anxiety in phenomenological discourse to do away with
philosophical abstraction. Whether or not this is achieved is a separate
question, though in Topophobia we see this theme turned on its head; if
phenomenology is a fundamentally anxious philosophy, what can it
offer us by way of explanation of the fundamental anxieties of our lives,
such as Trigg himself experiences in agoraphobia? Such a mode of
articulation warrants exemplifying. The book opens with the following
passage:
13 March 2011. You are standing beside the Pont Marie, a small
bridge positioned just off the Rue des Nonnains-d’Hyéres. The
bridge arches gently over the Seine before disappearing into the
crowds on the Ile Saint-Louis. […] At the entrance of the bridge,
you will re-enact a series of attempts at crossing the structure,
each time finding yourself unable to master the unfamiliar terrain
that divides you from the rest of the city. Faced with the prospect
of navigating the bridge, your body emits a series of sensations
and movements, which, despite being familiar to you, still mark
the possibility of a trauma yet to be written into your flesh. (xiii)
Here, Trigg adopts the second person both to implicate the reader in the
disclosure of strangeness whilst similtaneously underscoring the extent
to which anxiety involves a kind of othering wherein the self itself
becomes estranged.
Later in the work, Trigg develops something of a grounding for
this uncanniness in the figure of the home. This he defines as a discrete
entity as well as a “presence that structures the Agoraphobe’s experience
of spatiality more broadly” (xlii). He relates this specifically to anxiety in
the sense that the home establishes a variety of “centres” from which the
unhomely deviate. In moving towards this wider conception of the
anxious event, Trigg for the first time in his body of work dwells at
length on the relationship between psychoanalysis and phenomenology.
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In particular, his discussion of the Lacanian mirror stage poses the
question: Is anxiety the product of subjectivity, or is it its source? If the
latter is the case, Trigg proposes, the Agoraphobe experiences their
anxiety as a primary condition of being, a discomfort which illumines
the contours of selfhood.

  For this reader, Trigg’s earlier work The Thing: A Phenomenology of

Horror was a revelation in terms of turning continental philosophy to the
strange and uncanny without sacrificing its rigor and intellectual
scrutiny. Likewise, Topophobia takes us deeper into strange spaces,
but there is even more depth to this work than in his earlier writing.
Grounded in a subjectivity which is generatively exclusionary, Trigg
invites us to experience for ourselves the uncanniness of imagined
spaces. This reader found himself turning to Google Street View to
extend his sense of the anxious subject confronted by a “collision of
space and time” (xvii), attempting virtual equivalents of the same
journeys detailed in the work. Topophobia’s appeal lies in how compel-
lingly it poses the question: How does somewhere “become an anxious
space?” (xix). Its success as an investigation lies in the methodical way in
grounds this question both in a ‘real’ world outside the text, in phenome-
nological theses of spatiality and the literary and filmic worlds we so
often inhabit. It is another excellent book in a growing body of work
dedicated to encountering strangeness not as a peculiarity but as a
defining experience in our complicated and overdetermined sense of
selfhood.

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Tales of Webs of Tar – Steve Spence

The Blind Road Maker

Ian Duhig
(80 pp., £9.98, Picador Poetry (2016))

Ian Duhig is always a poet worth reading. His mix of traditional forms
with an almost manic erudition and punk sensibility ensure that you’re
going to be constantly surprised even if you don’t get all the references or
allusions. In terms of his insistence on metre and his sometimes thump-
ing musicality you can’t avoid thinking of Tony Harrison and even Peter
Reading. He also shares those poets’ concern with social issues – often
dystopian, as with Reading, and class-based, as more often than not with
Harrison. Key influences in this work are Byron’s long poem Don Juan,
Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy and the civil engineer and polymath
Blind Jack Metcalf, the inspiration for the book’s title.
In ‘Canto’, modelled on Byron’s Don Juan and fuelled with a
Sterne-like inclination towards the tangential, Duhig brings in classical
references (the fall of Troy) recent politics (Ashdown, Clegg and Gordon
Brown) and an hilarious and rumbustious ongoing commentary on dis-
putes within poetry which posits Prynne and Hill as contenders fight-
ing ‘in an impenetrable fog’. ‘Is Prynne why now your average college
nerdsworth / shuns Byron to study bloody Wordsworth?’ This is Barry
Tebb territory and given that Duhig himself clearly has more than a soft
spot for John Ashbery and uses a quote from Anne Carson as a preface to
one of his poems you have to take this with a pinch of salt. His mixing of
the colloquial with the high literary is all a part of his charm and, if he
occasionally needs to prove that he’s a literary bruiser, he’s much, much
funnier than Sean O’Brien! There is a serious aspect to the ‘class-conflict’
within Duhig’s poetry, however, and you’re never seriously left wonder-
ing which side he’s on.
Duhig clearly has an admiration for outsiders, for polymaths and
those whose lives have been less than celebrated, as exemplified in ‘The
Ballad of Blind Jack Metcalf – on the unveiling of his statue in Knares-
borough’. His verse here is muscular and rhythmic, skilfully combining
the colloquial with ‘high culture’, using his learning as a weapon in an
ongoing clash of class which Duhig regrets elsewhere ‘has not gone
away’. Folk art and the occult are also elements which infuse his poetry
in its oppositional aspect:

Sharp dealer, traffic was Jack’s gift,

in fish and flesh he’d trade;
a soldier, smuggler, fiddler, guide –
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 roadmaker when that paid.

He’d spin his tales of webs of tar

as dark as all he saw;
he was our Daedalus of roads
we’re each his Minotaur –

Asterions, his starry ones

we travel by his lights
a hundred thousand miles each day,
his thousand and one nights.

In ‘Riddle’ and more notably in ‘Brick Arch’ Duhig is again using his
knowledge and erudition as an oppositional resource, challenging the
phrase ‘thick as a brick’, with its common suggestion of stupidity or
denseness, often used in a class context, via an exploration of the history
of working in clay and its relationship to creativity. There is a link here
between the artisan and the artist rather than an unbridgeable gulf as
might be suggested elsewhere:

Baked clay tablets from Babylon tell

how bricks had symbolized creativity,
with the Mother of Us All, Belet-ili,
praised as ‘Our Brick of Lapiz Lazuli’;
how bricks from then to now dimple
as if impressed by her curving belly.

(from ‘Brick Arch’)

Yet Duhig is nothing if not plain awkward. In ‘The Balladeer’s Lament’

he appears to be arguing against the failings of free verse and bemoaning
his own traditional virtues – ‘Too old this dog.’ – while giving us a hom-
age to Edwin Morgan’s playful poetry on the facing page – ‘ The World Is
Everything That Is The Case’. Yet the play on ‘forms’ and hares’ may once
again suggest a conflict which is to some extent ‘tongue in cheek’:

The Balladeer’s Lament

My forms will never warm these hares

not here, nor there, they turn again
their free verse from my poem’s course
for mazes their own brains lay down.

119
 They slip my words as easily
as they their shapes and English gods
to please themselves, their world a breeze,
still new their tricks. Too old this dog.

I’m speculating here but I can’t help thinking that Duhig is represent-
ing an inner conflict between the playful, ludic aspect of writing, which
clearly features in his poetry, and the more ‘responsible’ craftsmanlike
nature of formal device, which is clearly also important to him. Form
and content, never divisible perhaps, yet there appears to be a recurring
need to air these issues. I can’t help wondering what he makes of some of
the younger practitioners now developing more experimental modes of
poetry, influenced by new technologies, work which nonetheless retains
a political aspect. Tom Jenks, for example.
In ‘The Rŭm District’ Duhig is in Ashbery mode, showing off his
linguistic knowledge and interest in etymology while punning inces-
santly and ecstatically, referencing Yeats for good measure – ‘ the Em-
peror’s soldiery drunken’ – and taking word association to new levels in
a manner more like that of a highly literate stand-up comedian:

Stanza meaning room. I ring room service

for the hair of the dog, ordering this
rûm cocktail which arrives with an orange slice,
an ash berry, and an ice cube
melting like this poem.

In ‘Shapeshifting Ghosts of Byland Abbey’ we are given an insight into

Duhig’s interest in the ‘supernatural’ via a prose poem which explores
the world of M.R. James. Duhig clearly has an interest in the source ma-
terial of James’ ghost stories and the ways in which such narratives have
been used in opposition to the prevailing power structures, whether the
government or the church. Similarly with ‘Mother Shipton’, where folk-
lore and the occult provide alternative sources of knowledge or informa-
tion which proves challenging to the authorities. There’s a repeating mo-
tif of a punk ethos in Duhig’s work, allied to a respect for knowledge and
understanding which is so often at odds with mainstream discourses. As
it becomes easier for us to access more and more information and harder
perhaps to distinguish ‘fact from fiction’ the possibilities are intriguing.

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Biographical Notes

Ben Marsh-Allen is an amateur poet, photographer and musician living

in the ancient village of Iwade, Kent. A creative writing graduate from
the University of Kent, he now spends his days writing, composing and
recording, whilst recruiting, training and managing volunteers for The
Prince’s Trust. A recent father and husband, he is now channeling his life
experiences through creative outlets.

Bill Bulloch is a writer and photographer. A graduate of Edge Hill Uni-

versity, he is currently studying towards a Masters in Creative Writing,
to hone his writing as a tool for further investigations in the field of in-
novative poetry. Bill is currently artist in residence for The Wolf poetry
magazine, where his photographic sequence ‘Anthropocene’ is presented
as cover and interior spread for issue 33, July 2016.

Bryn Tales is a PhD candidate in English Literature and Creative Writ-

ing at the University of Sheffield. His current research is working to-
wards the completion of his thesis entitled A Poetic Ethnography of the
Dearne Valley in the South Yorkshire Coalfield following Neoliberalism. Over
the past decade he has worked as a teacher of English at colleges across
Yorkshire and has published poetry with Smith/Doorstop amongst
many others.

Calum Hazell’s poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Jungftak,

Lunar Poetry and Great Works. In February 2016 he exhibited visual
work at St. John’s College, University of Oxford, as part of a project on
Charles Sanders Peirce’s semiotic. He regularly reads at Writers Forum
(New Series) and is a member of the Centre for Contemporary Poetry
(Contempo) research group. He can be contacted via calumhazell2009@
live.co.uk.

Camilla Nelson is a Somerset-based poet, artist and researcher. She has

presented her research at national and international conferences since
2010 and continues to perform and exhibit her text-work throughout the
UK. She is the creator of Poem Factory (A Performance Installation) and
a founding member of the Grass Routes collective. As a poet, her work
is regularly published in national and international magazines, journals
and anthologies and runs poetry workshops across London and South-
West England. She is the founding editor of Singing Apple Press and the
poetry editor of ALECC’s journal for literature, environment and cul-
ture, The Goose.

121
Charles Eager is a translator and scholar from Yorkshire, England. He is
coauthor of Synkronos (forthcoming, Autumn 2017).

Christopher Cokinos’s work has appeared in several venues, including

TYPO, diagram, december, Matter Monthly and Blackbox Manifold. He also
writes prose, with three nonfiction books to his credit, and just co-edited
a new book from Arizona called The Sonoran Desert: A Literary Field Guide.
He has had work recently in terrain.org, Pacific Standard and the Los Ange-
les Times.

David Rushmer’s artworks and writings have appeared in a number of

magazines and websites since the late 1980s, including: Angel Exhaust, Ar-
chive of the Now, BlazeVOX, E.ratio, Great Works, Molly Bloom, Shearsman, and
10th Muse. He has work included in Sea Pie: An Anthology of Oystercatcher
Poetry (Shearsman, 2012). His most recent published pamphlets are The
Family of Ghosts (Arehouse, Cambridge, 2005) and Blanchot’s Ghost (Oys-
tercatcher Press, 2008). He lives and works in the Cambridge area and
also sings in the Post-Punk Garage band, Kepler.

Dennis Andrew S. Aguinaldo teaches a course called “Reading Film,

TV, and the Internet” for the Department of Humanities of the Universi-
ty of the Philippines Los Baños. His poems have appeared in Transit, hal.,
and High Chair and more recently in Otoliths, Bukambibig, Jazz Cigarette,
and Softblow. He blogs at tekstongbopis.blogspot.com.

Dominic O’Key is an editor of the cultural studies and critical theory

journal, parallax. He also convenes the Creaturely Life reading group, and
is the 2016/17 co-director of Quilting Points, the interdisciplinary crit-
ical theory group. For this, he and Rachel Johnson focused on the work
of Hannah Arendt, and invited presentations from Profs. Simon Swift
(Geneva), Patrick Hayden (St Andrews) and Lyndsey Stonebridge (East
Anglia). He co-organised the WRoCAH-funded event World Against
Globe: Reconceptualising World Literatures Today (April 2016) and the
workshop Futures of Memory (Feb 2017). Most recently, he and Ian Elli-
son hosted a workshop on W. G. Sebald: Beyond Sebald: New Trajectories
in Sebald Studies (May 2017). He is a member of the Northern Animals
collective.

Eline Tabak: I hold a Bachelor’s degree in English from the University

of Groningen (with a year abroad at the University of York) and a Mas-
ter’s degree in Comparative Literary Studies at the University of Utrecht,
where I engaged with gender studies, new materialism, posthumanism,
and ecocriticism and the Anthropocene. This year, I will start my PhD

122
at the Rachel Carson Center, Munich, with a project tentatively titled
‘Reading Against the Anthropocene? An Investigation of the Impact of
Environmental Literature’.

Grizel Luttman-Johnson has returned to drawing and printmaking

after a period of producing mar-bled papers. She also makes handmade
books and is a member of Appledore Craft Collective. Grizel works from
her studio in Hartland, Devon and is a member of Appledore Craft Col-
lective. She has a degree in Fine Art from Wimbledon School of Art.

Heather J. Macpherson writes from New England. Her work has ap-
peared in Blueline, Spillway, Pearl, CLARE Literary, OVS, Niche, ATOMIC, The
Heron Tree, Nerve Cowboy and other fine publications. She has twice been
features editor for The Worcester Review and has been a guest blogger on
The Best American Poetry Blog which featured her interview, and essay,
with Stephanie Brown. Heather is executive director at Damfino Press.

Kirby Manià holds an MA in Modern Literature and Culture from the

University of York and a PhD in English from the University of the
Witwatersrand. She currently teaches English Literature and critical
thinking to students in the Faculty of Engineering and the Built
Environment at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg.
Her work has appeared in New Contrast, Brittle Paper, Itch and The Kalahari
Review.

Natalie Joelle is writing a transdisciplinary study of gleaning and lean

culture at Birkbeck, University of London, funded by the Arts and
Humanities Research Council. Her creative work has appeared in Plum-
wood Mountain, Datableed and Intercapillary Space. Further information
about her work is available on Academia.edu, and she can be reached at
natalie@gleaning.info.

Oliver Perrott-Webb is studying in the Centre for Modern Poetry at the

University of Kent.

Rachel Gippetti’s debut collection, Birthright, has recently been pub-

lished by Eyewear Publishing as part of the Aviator Pamphlet Series.
Her work has also appeared in publications in the UK and USA including
Shearsman Magazine, The Stinging Fly, THIEF and The Apple Valley Review and
she is the author of several children’s books. Born in Boston, Rachel now
lives in the South West of the UK. She works at Plymouth College of Art,
sporadically runs the Plymouth-based literary night Lit and is a member
of the band Booby Trap.

123
Skye McDade-Burn: I am currently training to be an Integrative Child
Counsellor. Before this I did an undergraduate degree in Japanese and
Politics, and then an MA in Modern and Contemporary Literature. I
have had a poem, ‘Playground’, published in the most recent issue of
Different Skies Journal. I also occasionally DJ, and have some mixes online
here- https://www.mixcloud.com/talesoftono/. On my mixcloud page is
also a live reading of ‘Playground’ with a soundscape that I did on the
radio show Bad Punk on Resonance FM.

Sneha Subramanian Kanta is pursuing her second postgraduate de-

gree in literature at the University of Plymouth, United Kingdom and an
awardee of the GREAT scholarship. She is also the Poetry Editor for INK,
published by the university press. Her work has appeared or is to appear
in Ann Arbor Review (MI, USA), The Rain, Party & Disaster Society (USA) and
in poetry anthologies such as Dance of the Peacock (Hidden Brook Press,
Canada), Suvarnarekha (The Poetry Society of India, India) and elsewhere.

Steve Spence lives in Plymouth and helps to run The Language Club, a
group which promotes live poetry events and is based at the Arts Centre.
His reviews and poetry have appeared in a number of magazines, no-
tably Great Works, Shearsman, Stride, Tears in the Fence, Tenth Muse and The
Rialto. He was assistant editor of Terrible Work magazine for four issues
and in 2007 completed an MA in Creative Writing at the University of
Plymouth. A Curious Shipwreck is his first collection of poetry and Penned
in the Margins released his second book, Limits of Control in 2011.

Steven Hitchins is a poet from the South Wales Valleys. Brought up in

Abercynon, where the River Cynon meets the Taff, he currently lives a
few miles downriver in Rhydyfelin, Pontypridd. Through publications
such as Bitch Dust (Hafan 2012) and The White City (Aquifer 2015), he
has been conducting a mobile, non-linear mapping of the South Wales
coalfield, using cut-up techniques and psychogeographical dérives to
excavate industrial wounds and geological layerings along the invisible
routes of the deleted canals. His poetry and articles have appeared in
Poetry Wales, New Welsh Review, Junction Box and Wales Arts Review, and he
has performed at the Hay Poetry Jamboree in Hay-on-Wye, Poets Live in
Paris, the Bath Arts Fringe Festival and the North Wales International
Poetry Festival.

Stuart Ross is a writer, editor, and writing teacher living in Cobourg,

Ontario. He is the author of 20 books of poetry, fiction, and essays, in-
cluding A Sparrow Came Down Resplendent (Wolsak and Wynn, 2016), A
Hamburger in a Gallery (DC Books, 2015), Further Confessions of a Small Press

124
Racketeer (Anvil Press, 2015), and Our Days in Vaudeville (Mansfield Press,
2014). He recently released the first and final issue of the poetry mag-
azine The Northern Testicle Review. Stuart is currently working on several
poetry and fiction projects, as well as a memoir. His second novel,
Pockets, comes out in fall 2017 from ECW Press. Stuart blogs at
bloggamooga.blogspot.ca.

Tom Betteridge is a writer and researcher living in London. His poems

and essays have appeared in Textual Practice, Blackbox Manifold,
DATABLEED, Gnommero, Hix Eros, Intercapillary Space, The Literateur, Scree,
Spam, and ZARF. His first poetry collection, Pedicure, is available from
Sine Wave Peak press.

Tom Snarsky teaches mathematics at Malden High School in Malden,

Massachusetts, USA.

William Telford works as Business Editor at The Herald in Plymouth,

UK. He has an MA in Creative Writing from Plymouth University. His
short stories and poetry have been published in Spelk, Short Fiction, Ink,
Flair, the Western Morning News and The Broadsheet. In 2012 he was short-
listed for the Bristol Short Story Prize.

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 EPIZOOTICS! Editorial Team

Caitlin Stobie
Caitlin Stobie is a doctoral researcher at the University of Leeds, where
she is director of the Leeds Animal Studies Network and a member
of the Northern Animals Research Collective. Her poems and short
stories have appeared in journals such as Poetry & Audience, Zoomorphic,
The Stockholm Review of Literature, Plumwood Mountain, New Contrast, New
Coin, and Flash. Her interests include posthumanism, postcolonial
ecocriticism, and the interstices between literature and biology.

Harrison Sullivan
Harrison Sullivan is a CHASE funded PhD student at the University of
Kent working in post-war British and American Poetry. In this regard
his academic interests include in the Anthropocene, the relationship
to the non-human other and poetic form. His interests also extend to
a fascination with the Godzilla franchise, especially the movement
from inhuman symbol to last line of defence for Japan from the
extensive pantheon of monsters which populate the films. He also has
a long running interest in extended narratives in films, such as Bela
Tarr’s Satantango or Lav Diaz’s Melancholia. His musical tastes have
been characterised by oscillation between Joanna Newsom and Scott
Walker while attempting to broaden my horizons when not completely
immersed in the former or the latter.

Peter Adkins
Peter Adkins is a PhD student at the University of Kent working on a
thesis that examines the figure of the nonhuman and the agency of the
geological in the writings of James Joyce, Virginia Woolf and Djuna
Barnes. He has a side interest in slow techno and the fuzzy, distorted end
of ambient music. He has had work published in The Glasgow Review of
Books, Inverted Audio and The James Joyce Broadsheet

Matthew Carbery
Matthew Carbery is an Early Career Researcher, poet, musician
and Associate Lecturer at University of Plymouth and University of Kent.
He has recently finished his first monograph, entitled Acts of Extended

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Inquiry: Phenomenology in the Late 20th Century American Long Poem. His
poetry has been published in Black Market Review, Otoliths, Blackbox
Manifold, Tears In The Fence, Stride, CTRL ALT DEL and Dead King Magazine.
His work is largely based on American Poetics and is invested in
European Phenomenology and philosophical pessisism. He is currently
devoting most of his time to producing music and artworks to the Grim
Songs project, a series of doom-folk experiments.

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Epizootics!
Issue 2
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