£7.50
These poems navigate the journey of two runaways as they planet-hop through a disintegrating empire of colonized worlds. Inspired by processes of mistranslation and ekphrasis, Kirsten Luckins takes us through an experimental sci-fi high-flyer where octopi seek out strip clubs and anything can be bought at a spaceport. Beautiful, shocking, funny and prescient these poems defy easy explanation, and present us with glimses of ruined and defiant futures.
Description
after other utopias are planted
we go on to the next fixer-upper,
mare’s tail colonizing the Low Field, dry rot in the joists.
the barn door scrapes over chicken scratches,
dandelions dig in their heels, multiple moons
as pale as seed-clocks count out
the months of our foundation.
in our flat-beds, a familiarity of mattocks,
a repetition of rakes,
trowel fits to spade fits to shovel
like a nest of measuring spoons,
with which we portion out our faith.
to us is given a bushel of corn
and the almanac of Eden.
“This little book is lush with desire. The writing is sensuous, bodily, attuned to the satisfactions of food and movement, but it’s also desirous of the future, yearning for the great possibility of other worlds. There’s dense pleasure in the writing, thick patternings of sound that wake the tongue to its needs. To read with Luckins is to journey through complex and compromised deep space, and to understand how all travel is an effort to reach into the numinous potential of experience.” — Harry Josephine Giles, author of Deep Wheel Orcadia
“Within the pages of ‘Offworld’ Kirsten Luckins takes us far from Earth, to places where the air may or may not agree with us. These settings feel at once delightfully surreal and grubbily familiar – we’re always somewhere between a coral reef of handbags and a litter-strewn canal bank. This collection raises playful questions of how we keep going as our world changes in big ways and small; its voice is tough, empathetic and questing.” — Suzannah Evans, author of Space Baby
These poems navigate the journey of two runaways as they planet-hop through a disintegrating empire of colonized worlds. Inspired by processes of mistranslation and ekphrasis, Kirsten Luckins takes us through an experimental sci-fi high-flyer where octopi seek out strip clubs and anything can be bought at a spaceport. Beautiful, shocking, funny and prescient these poems defy easy explanation, and present us with glimses of ruined and defiant futures.
Kirsten Luckins is a poet and performer from Teesside, and founding director of spoken word organisation Tees Women Poets. Her work has been widely published in magazines from Butcher’s Dog to Magma, and her third collection Passerine (Bad Betty) was longlisted for the Laurel Prize for Eco-Poetry. She is interested in ekphrasis, ecopoetics and experimentation generally.
36 pages staple-bound, 978-1-7395051-5-8