No one here is waiting for this news.
Is the place where you are now
the wrong place too?
My second book of poems, Enemy Luck,
was published in March 2019 by Peepal
Tree Press.
Like a script for a wonder voyage, or
the scheme for a fantastic masquerade band, these poems are
populated with men who turn into birds and jaguars which
turn into flowers, fabulist travellers, a cousin named for a
god, a possibly mythical Mesoamerican king, bees and ants
intent on secret missions, odd rituals and games. These
characters — alter agos? alibis? — suggest questions about
the unlikely places poems come from, and the disguises in
which they can appear: proverbs, parables, found texts and
other “readymades,” collages, unfaithful translations.
The poems prefer devious routes to direct ones, but certain
preoccupations recur: the slippery rivalries between myth
and history, literature and dreams, accident and mistake. Enemy
Luck challenges readers to think about the
expectations and accumulated experiences we bring to the
shaping influence of literary forms — and hints that poetry
itself is a kind of enemy, and a kind of luck.
102 pp • ISBN 9781845234393
Read more poems by Nicholas Laughlin