Afterlife as Trash E-Book

Rushika Wick

• Herausgeber: Verve Poetry Press
• Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021

Seitenzahl: 50

Beschreibung

Rushika Wick's poems are works of great imaginative power, both formally and in terms of their contents. In the exuberant opening poem of this collection, 'Diaries Of An Artist In Hiding', she is by turns the president, Matisse, a love letter, the weather, a badger; 'the experiment is boundless / like the imagination of a new subspecies /of giant squid / immeasurable and brilliant, / its owner perceived as a delicacy.' It is a poem that seems to stand as a sort of manifesto for the whole book, which feels like poetry that contains such energy it has started to wriggle free from the usual constraints of subject and form. But unlike so much experimental poetry, the reader is brought along for the ride and encouraged to feel the wind in their hair. Characters appear - Camille Claudel, Michael Knight, Lady Chatterley - only to vanish again in a single line once their work is done. Poetic forms are introduced only to be blown apart, words scattering across the page like paint-spatter, letters vanishing to reveal deeper truths. These poems are so full of life even as they acknowledge the stark realities that are a risk to life - also the very real presence of death. And everything is here. And trash is everywhere. And the wind is blowing it and us. It is exhilarating! 'The poems in Rushika Wick's debut collection are like little time bombs, packed with shocking and beautiful truths about how we live, what and who we love, how we die. They often feel as if they've been translated from a mysterious language or passed on in whispers – their imagery is so rich and strange and compressed – but always in the moment and pushing against conventional lyric and form. She approaches her subjects with a forensic eye and a deft scalpel, getting to the heart of what's vital.' – Tamar Yoseloff

Leseprobe

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Rushika Wick is a poet, doctor and Children’s Rights advocate who is interested in how social structures and relationships impact the body. She has performed with the Cold Lips Magazine collective in London, Rough Night Press (Amsterdam) and Skylark (Norwich) communities. Her work has been published in literary magazines including Ambit, Datableed and Tentacular and within anthologies including Fool-saint (Tangerine Press), Alter Egos (Bad Betty Press) and Smear (Andrews McMeel). She is delighted to have Verve publishing her first collection Afterlife As Trash.

Website: https://rushikawick.com

Instagram: @rushikawick

‘The poems in Rushika Wick’s debut collection are like little time bombs, packed with shocking and beautiful truths about how we live, what and who we love, how we die. They often feel as if they’ve been translated from a mysterious language or passed on in whispers – their imagery is so rich and strange and compressed – but always in the moment and pushing against conventional lyric and form. She approaches her subjects with a forensic eye and a deft scalpel, getting to the heart of what’s vital.’ - Tamar Yoseloff

‘Rushika Wick’s sensational debut pops with blistering satire and psychedelic detail. In ‘a time that calls for swords not ink’, this book’s code-switching, unreliable narrator shines a light on all that is absurd, tragic and fabulous about being human.’ - Amy Acre

‘A mesmerising collection filled with heart and magnetic wonder.’ - Greta Bellamacina

‘Her poems grow in the mind of the reader, examining the sustainability of humanity as it is ... each poem captures the moment before everything explodes.’ - Ana Seferovic

PUBLISHED BY VERVE POETRY PRESS

https://vervepoetrypress.com

[email protected]

All rights reserved

© 2021 Rushika Wick

The right of Rushika Wick to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

No part of this work may be reproduced, stored or transmitted in any form or by any means, graphic, electronic, recorded or mechanical, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

FIRST PUBLISHED APR 2021

Printed and bound in the UKby ImprintDigital, Exeter

ISBN: 978-1-912565-56-6

ePub ISBN: 978-1-912565-94-8

Cover Art by Juli About - Juliabout.wix.com/ceramique

“I felt a kind of vertigo, as if I were merely plunging from one world to another, and in each I arrived shortly after the end of the world had taken place.”

— Italo Calvino, If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler

“The inferno of the living is not something that will be; if there is one, it is what is already here, the inferno where we live every day, that we form by being together. There are two ways to escape suffering it. The first is easy for many: accept the inferno and become such a part of it that you can no longer see it. The second is risky and demands constant vigilance and apprehension: seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space.”

— Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities

CONTENTS

Diaries Of An Artist In Hiding

ULTRAMARINE PINK PV15

Deus Ex Machina

The Party

The Friends

The Dog

The Flea

Love Island

It Is Raining And Everyone Is Fading

Cut-ups

Elite Members Of The Momentariat

The Thoughts Of Valerie Solanas

Why I Cannot Watch Most Films Twice

Section 2 Of The Mental Health Act

Hair

Parakeet Earrings

The Pill

After Reading A Rewilding Book

Baba Yaga In Her Life As A Teacher

The Time An Eagle

Love Can Be Found In The Ruins

My Identical Twin

Vocal Tics

In The Tower That Night

Il Telefono Giallo Nella Casa Gialla

Yellow Phone In The Yellow House

Blue Period

Cameo Brooch Of A Young Woman

Erosion

Table Settings

Breathe

Athens Is The New Berlin

Green As Supreme Emperor

Dinner For One

Old Ladies Of The European Countryside

Red Eggs

519 People

Making The Most Of Space

Falling & Seeing Language

You Are Wondering About The Past Life

Gaia In The Live Lounge

Acknowledgements

Afterlife

As Trash

Tumbling plastic bag

holding so much yesterday

for such a short time.

Diaries Of An Artist In Hiding

I am the president

I tell myself out loud in the car

on the way to work as a social experiment,

I am the president I am the president

by the end of the journey I am taller, fatter,

dreaming of an André Breton republic and Cuban cigars.

The broader view is my poetry of hagiography,

I am becoming beatific,

rise above most things -

a swallow filled with helium

soon to feel altitude sickness.

Really the experiment is myself,

there are no controls that I am aware of

it’s a pretty state of affairs

can do what I want when I want and so on.

I am Matisse with a charcoal

drawing on the walls from my sick bed today.

The flu is viral and I am kept inside

a glass cloche of yellow and pink spring blooms.

More work is needed I tell myself,

only the lines, the forms, the space can reveal the truth absolute

straight from a Russian Vodka God or my dancing hands,

no deviation from the discipline of the line.

Charcoal dust falls to the concrete floor.

I am romantic on Tuesday

a love letter from Camille to Rodin

filled with the language of marble,

flowering fingers, fractures,

scatters of light picking out human form.

Rasps and rifflers fall from cramped hands

warming each other beneath dust sheets.

Most days I have concealed myself so well

that I am free to lie in a dark space,

expecting nothing but the occasional

levitation of a knife or

corkscrewing of a bird feeder.

I am becoming the weather.

I hear of snow on the radio,

next day it falls on cherry blossom,

petals and ice confuse.

Oh the joys of such freedom!

This morning I am a badger

I have an earthen dwelling and

have bitten you for coming too close

unheeding of the clear warnings.

Soon I will piss en plein air and

find some unwanted dog food and

be happy.

The experiment is boundless

like the imagination of a new subspecies

of giant squid,