Boy in Various Poses E-Book

Lewis Buxton

• Herausgeber: Nine Arches Press
• Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021

Seitenzahl: 37

Beschreibung

Boy in Various Poses, a debut collection of poems from Lewis Buxton, explores all the different types of boy you can be – tender, awful, thoughtful, vulnerable. Here, a maelstrom of mental health, male bodies, and sexuality is laid bare with wit and curiosity, and the complexity and multiplicity of gender itself is revealed. The boy in question is often shapeshifting, slippery, unreliable, close yet never quite in focus, moving too fast to pause and take a breath - yet Buxton studies these boys, their bodies and behaviours, with a disarming intimacy and precision. These poems are provocative, nuanced and often laugh-out-loud funny, shining with a naked, shameless brilliance. "Poems that capture the rugby scrum of insight and uncertainty, the questions and discoveries I remember and still live. It pulled me in and showed me its birth marks. Loved it." – Steven Camden, Polarbear "Corporeal, surreal, and shocking, these poems are also beautifully tender - and Buxton's precise, imagistic use of language often has the poems singing from the page. A bold and moving debut." – Hannah Lowe "In this assured debut, Lewis Buxton asks 'how does a boy become a man?'. The answers are myriad and transgressive, lyrical and smart. The answers are more questions. The answers are flowers and oranges, hunger, knuckles, slow dancing, glitter and fear. In these taut poems, conventions are dropped stylishly, elegantly 'like a coat on a dance floor.' We are left watching a departing figure, a boy running 'out of his lungs', 'the sky's hair...flecked with grey.' This book is unforgettable, utterly addictive." – Helen Mort

Leseprobe

Boy in Various Poses

Boy in Various Poses

Lewis Buxton

ISBN: 9781913437138

eISBN: 9781913437145

Copyright © Lewis Buxton

Cover artwork: ‘Them’ © Anita Staff

www.ffatsatina.com

All rights reserved. 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.

Lewis Buxton has asserted his right under Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work.

First published May 2021 by:

Nine Arches Press

Unit 14, Sir Frank Whittle Business Centre,

Great Central Way, Rugby.

CV21 3XH

United Kingdom

www.ninearchespress.com

Printed in the United Kingdom by:

Imprint Digital

Nine Arches Press is supported using public funding by Arts Council England.

Contents

Sevenling

A Boy Becomes a Brooding Hen

The Partridges

A Boy Becomes a Mandrake

Small Hands

A Boy Runs

Tense

Boys Play Football

Field Dressing a Rabbit

A Boy Sees a Ghost

Parliament Hill Lido

A Boy Turns Ten

Scrum

A Boy Gets a Hand Job

The Cuckoos

Fuckboy

The Weasel

A Boy is a Poet

Horses

A Boy in a Blue Suit

Mackerel Fishing

Boy Wonder

Shadow Boxing

Frightened Rabbit

The Pennine Way

Nom De Guerre

Boy in Various Poses

Advice from the Quarterback

A Boy with Haemorrhoids

Butchery

Flower Boy

Wind

A Boy Falls

A&E

A Boy Does a Magic Trick

Taxidermy

A Boy Stands On Top of an Air Vent

Sleep Apnoea

Feather Boy

Freddie the Lion

Boys Audition to be Strippers

Tease

Snowboy

Red Shirt

Boys Do Push Ups

Water Weight

A Boy Watches Die Hard

Gifts

A Boy Becomes a Vegetarian

Shaving Tips

Boy, Undressing

Cues

A Boy Gets Married

Notes

Acknowledgements

About the author and this book

Sevenling

I dress like my idea of a boy:

creased trousers & pea coats & good shoes,

things the world expects of me.

I’d love to paint my eyes & nails

& skin the colour of dusk & blood & sky

be beautiful for a moment, dropping

expectations like a coat on a dance floor.

A Boy Becomes a Brooding Hen

A boy wants a baby, dreams of being a father, stuffs footballs up his jumper & practises midlife crises, crocodile tears in the shower. He wants to lay an egg but looks down at his body, presses his belly outward: moon held in his hands, listens to the water under his skin. He imagines himself running with a buggy, looks at his friends with babies, is jealous of their casual fatherhood, their Sundays & car keys. He thinks he’d like to have a boy and for that boy to be a dancer. He touches his nipples and asks what are these? Memories of the parent I could have been when I was a half-formed thing, sexless & drifting in water.

The Partridges

take off with the same anxious

engine-flap of wings you hear

from topless boys on mopeds

who fly together up

a high road in August, t-shirts

fluttering round shoulders.

In autumn the partridges

do not know they are being

hunted or that this hum-thrum-beat

of their wing-machines is good

as a car horn for the mouths

of the shotguns. The partridges

are too slow & stupid to survive

so they feather-drum

into the shout of the guns

swallowed whole by the scatter-pattern

leaving the silence of a crashed

moped behind them.

A Boy Becomes a Mandrake

A boy is born screaming, his knotted root face wrenched from the good, clean earth. Before he was skin he was green, before he was bone he was bark. Shouting from his bed, gasping for water before milk. Scream & writhe is the only language he is capable of so far. It was lonely in the soil but to be pulled from the packed dirt’s dark hug with no warning is even worse. Now the only thing he knows each day is there will be morning & hunger again & again.

Small Hands

We hug on the only chair left in the classroom,

high-pitched love & no fight.

We are so small that our bottoms

fit on the same dip of red plastic.

We are only vaguely aware of the distance

men are supposed to keep,

how silence should stretch between us

like an Achilles meeting muscle & bone.

If we could, we would hug & kiss

as girls do, hold hands on the way to lessons,