John’s Spring Picks 2024
Selected by the Bookshop
I was told by Gayle I had to choose my spring picks, so “spring picks” is the title, but really in my view May is a summer month; decent cherry tomatoes beginning to re-emerge in Sainsburys, the fountain turned back on in Russell Square, Cypress Hill’s seminal Temples of Boom (surely the Platonic form of a summer record) returning to regular rotation on the old minidisc player. Also there’s loads of excellent poetry on the shelves: Steve Ely has finally published his astonishing tripartite epic about his namesake the eel, Carrie Etter and Ellen Cranitch explore grief and addiction, Sasha Dugdale’s The Strongbox is her most ambitious work yet, and Sylvia Legris continues to sound like nobody else writing in English.
From the publisher:
Carrie Etter’s Grief’s Alphabet is a shattering elegy for the poet’s mother, opening a pathway through grief in spite of the impossible task of expressing such a loss. The collection evokes the complex, intimate…
From the publisher:
Crystal traces the arc of one woman’s experience after the discovery that her partner is addicted to crystal meth. In a highly original poetic act of reclamation, it plunders the drug itself and makes of it an overarching conceit…
From the publisher:
The title of Sylvia Legris' melopoeic collection The Principle of Rapid Peering comes from a phrase the nineteenth-century ornithologist and field biologist Joseph Grinnell used to describe the feeding behaviour of certain birds. Rather…
From the publisher:
'It began with the sunappearing over the plane wingsupernatural…
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From the publisher:
Eely is a symphony in four movements. The first movement, Eel, focuses on the lifecycle, ecology, epic migration, conservation status and enigma of the European eel. The second movement, /ˈiːlai/, explores two main…
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