Winner of the John Pollard Foundation International Poetry Prize Winner of the Christopher Ewart-Biggs Memorial Prize The Sun is Open sifts through a boxed archive of public and private materials related to the life and death of the author's father, who was murdered by the IRA outside their Belfast home in 1984. Moving between child and adult voices, past and present, this startlingly innovative debut attempts to decode the fragments left behind and, with them, piece together a history and a life. 'Each page of The Sun Is Open is rich with exquisite and surprising language, pain, and wisdom.' - Maggie Nelson 'The Sun is Open employs a grammar in which everything is significant, from Wendy Houses, to the very hairs of your head, to the poetry of First Aid instructions, to slaters. This is meticulous and painstaking - sometimes pain-making work - making the words fit the columns, be they inches of newsprint or entries in an Account Book, negotiating or nudging the meanings into alternative senses. A series of ethical considerations and transactions, credits and debits that sometimes demand to be accounted for, or judged, or at least spoken of in the light of whatever the forensics might or might never unfold.' - Ciaran Carson Poetry book of the month - the Observer A TLS book of the year

Winner of the 2022 John Pollard Foundation International Poetry Prize

About the Author
Gail McConnell is a writer and critic from Belfast. She is the author of two poetry pamphlets: Fothermather (Ink Sweat & Tears, 2019) and Fourteen (Green Bottle Press, 2018). A programme based on Fothermather was produced by Conor Garrett for Radio 4 in 2020 and made available as a Seriously... podcast. Gail's poems have appeared in Poetry Review, PN Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, Blackbox Manifold and Stand, and she is the recipient of two awards from the Arts Council of Northern Ireland. She is Senior Lecturer in English at Queen's University Belfast and the author of Northern Irish Poetry and Theology (Palgrave, 2014). Gail's writing interests include violence, creatureliness, queerness and the possibilities and politics of language and form.

Reviews
'To sit with the unspeakable, to spell it out in alphabet spaghetti, using only the letters given to you that day; to spell death using the adverts in the cash and carry; to spell life using the names on sweet wrappers, is extraordinary work. The Sun is Open is a work of extraordinary emotion, written with extraordinary control. It is also - perhaps extraordinarily - a work of joy.'-Joanna Walsh, 'The Sun is Open is like fragments of a broken window reassembled into startling new form and meaning. The fragments include the Bible, press reports, personal memories and the archives of William McConnell, Deputy Governor of the Maze prison and the poet's father, who was murdered by the IRA in 1984. The reassembling - usually into squares and boxes of type with fragments of sources - presents us with the jagged memorial of a broken time.'- George Szirtes, 'The Sun is Open brings us 109 pages closer to knowing that raging absence in the wake of violence, in the wake of love; the wakefulness that persists. The poem is history as postmodern text - all middle, no endpapers, no polite intermission or lapses of memory. This book's freedom of thought is not taken lightly, but gloriously, celebratorily. Gail McConnell is a force.'- Caoilinn Hughes


Awards
Winner of John Pollard Foundation International Poetry Prize 2022 and Christopher Ewart-Biggs Memorial Prize 2022.



Book Information
ISBN 9781908058928
Author Gail McConnell
Format Paperback
Page Count 126
Imprint Penned in the Margins
Publisher Penned in the Margins