Heat Wave is a form of poetic cabaret,'What good is sitting, alone in your room?/ come hear the music play!' If a cabaret is full of high jinks it can also land punches - truth can be masked by the burlesque and the grotesque: 'Tell all the truth but tell it slant'.

Luke Kennard has said of Stannard's writing, 'I know of few other poets who can write of cruelty, hysteria and disappointment with such levity and grace.' Will Eaves speaks of a 'comic vitality'. Heat Wave seeks to unsettle and wrong-foot; it refuses to adopt a sententious or holier than thou attitudes regarding the many crises which confront us. The poems subvert as well as entertain.

Critics have noted 'a tonal control and simultaneous considerations of matters mordant and gleeful.' The reader might weep and laugh on the same page. The lyrical and the demotic might walk hand in hand.

About the Author
Please Don't Bomb the Ghost of my Brother is Julian Stannard's ninth collection. He is a Reader in English and Creative Writing at the University of Winchester. He taught at the university of Genoa for ten years. He is the author of Sottoripa: Genoese Poems (2018), a bilingual collection. He is a Hawthornden and Bogliasco Fellow. His poetry has been shortlisted for the Forward and he has been awarded the International Troubadour Prize.

Reviews

This is a brilliant collection, endlessly rich, strange and funny, blessed with a unique voice that is both instantly unmistakable, and yet capable of boundless elasticity. Locked down on Brexit Island, Heat Wave is the most perfectly unreliable companion anyone could wish for.

-- Alan Bilton * Ambit Magazine *



Book Information
ISBN 9781784632182
Author Julian Stannard
Format Paperback
Page Count 112
Imprint Salt Publishing
Publisher Salt Publishing
Dimensions(mm) 198mm * 129mm * 8mm