Description
I'm totally killing your vibes is one-part phantasmagoria, one-part brutal document, with equal measures of irony and sincerity. It is a book compulsively drawn to a world in which identity and performance have become indistinguishable, where the squelch and seep of feelings frustrate our safety nets of logic and ethics, and violence and inadequacy are so often the corollaries of love. I'm totally killing your vibes is a book of poems concerning the exuberant performance, and the manic dissolution, of the self. It moves through the slow, fragmented dissolve of a relationship, via a tableau vivant of assorted, itinerant characters, and an extended, darkly comic dialogue with the feedback of literary, academic, and everyday life. A final, long-form prose poem extends the book's interrogation of consumption as our contemporary mode of self-construction, of masculinity, and of desire.
About the Author
Ahren Warner has published four books of poetry with Bloodaxe. His debut, Confer (2011), was shortlisted for both the Forward Prize for Best First Collection and the Michael Murphy Memorial Prize 2013, and followed by Pretty (2013) and by Hello. Your promise has been extracted (2017), which was shortlisted for the Roehampton Poetry Prize 2018. His fourth collection, I'm totally killing your vibes, was published in 2022. His collections have received three Poetry Book Society Recommendations and awards including an Arts Foundation Fellowship. He works across writing, photography and moving image, with an intermedia project, The sea is spread and cleaved and furled published by Prototype in 2020, and a film - I'm thinking what would sound sincere but also, like, oh, that's super cute, selected for Bloomberg New Contemporaries (2020).
Reviews
Warner's verse appears to discuss this collocation of scarified surfaces - their bitty, cracked, granular noise, redolent of industrial disuse, and abuse - with the hygienic space in which art is consumed... this is poetry (it is poetry) of extraordinary poise and power. -- Vidyan Ravinthiran * The Poetry Review *
Theatrical, toxic and oddly gorgeous... Warner moves from playful social observation, through reflections on memory and artifice, to a near-Baudelairean spleen, his games with language and ideas as serious in their investigations of the given world as any philosophy. -- John Burnside * PBS Bulletin *
A messy, disturbing triumph in the traditions of Arthur Rimbaud and John Berryman: how Le bateau Ivre or The Dream Songs would read if they'd been written today. It too could be the anthem of a generation. -- Fiona Sampson * The Guardian, on The sea is spread and cleaved and furled *
As I read it I felt I had wandered from a party and stumbled into something vulnerable, something human and real beyond the clinking of glasses and fake laughter. That I had gotten the chance to hide in a closet and listen to a conversation I needed to hear but couldn't quite access on my own... a conversation between the speaker and the other, and most importantly - a conversation between Mr Warner and himself. What a strange joy to be invited in. -- Matthew Dickman * on The sea is spread and cleaved and furled *
Book Information
ISBN 9781780376028
Author Ahren Warner
Format Paperback
Page Count 112
Imprint Bloodaxe Books Ltd
Publisher Bloodaxe Books Ltd
About the Author
Ahren Warner has published four books of poetry with Bloodaxe. His debut, Confer (2011), was shortlisted for both the Forward Prize for Best First Collection and the Michael Murphy Memorial Prize 2013, and followed by Pretty (2013) and by Hello. Your promise has been extracted (2017), which was shortlisted for the Roehampton Poetry Prize 2018. His fourth collection, I'm totally killing your vibes, was published in 2022. His collections have received three Poetry Book Society Recommendations and awards including an Arts Foundation Fellowship. He works across writing, photography and moving image, with an intermedia project, The sea is spread and cleaved and furled published by Prototype in 2020, and a film - I'm thinking what would sound sincere but also, like, oh, that's super cute, selected for Bloomberg New Contemporaries (2020).
Reviews
Warner's verse appears to discuss this collocation of scarified surfaces - their bitty, cracked, granular noise, redolent of industrial disuse, and abuse - with the hygienic space in which art is consumed... this is poetry (it is poetry) of extraordinary poise and power. -- Vidyan Ravinthiran * The Poetry Review *
Theatrical, toxic and oddly gorgeous... Warner moves from playful social observation, through reflections on memory and artifice, to a near-Baudelairean spleen, his games with language and ideas as serious in their investigations of the given world as any philosophy. -- John Burnside * PBS Bulletin *
A messy, disturbing triumph in the traditions of Arthur Rimbaud and John Berryman: how Le bateau Ivre or The Dream Songs would read if they'd been written today. It too could be the anthem of a generation. -- Fiona Sampson * The Guardian, on The sea is spread and cleaved and furled *
As I read it I felt I had wandered from a party and stumbled into something vulnerable, something human and real beyond the clinking of glasses and fake laughter. That I had gotten the chance to hide in a closet and listen to a conversation I needed to hear but couldn't quite access on my own... a conversation between the speaker and the other, and most importantly - a conversation between Mr Warner and himself. What a strange joy to be invited in. -- Matthew Dickman * on The sea is spread and cleaved and furled *
Book Information
ISBN 9781780376028
Author Ahren Warner
Format Paperback
Page Count 112
Imprint Bloodaxe Books Ltd
Publisher Bloodaxe Books Ltd
