Michael Sutton is the author of two previous books of poetry, music/lyrics (Hesterglock Press), and Nineteen Nightmares and a Dream (Alien Buddha Press). He also edits Overground Underground, an occasional magazine of art and literature. He is a recipient of the Streetcake Experimental Writing Prize.
Twitter: @msuttonwriter Web: michaelsutton.co.uk
Introduction to Superpositions published by Beir Bua Press
I was asked to write an introduction to this book, which is good, because I enjoy writing, this thing I do now, right now, and now.
This collection contains, interspersed, a tenuous poetics against realism. But this is odd, as many of the poems which parenthesise these sections are based in the very real realities of the last two years of life on earth. Based, but it befits me to further warp these realities, tumescing them with imagined people and places, imagined words and imagined psychologies. Parentheses are funny things, like the trees who parenthesise this bench, and the auld fella smoking on the bench, and, who knows, all the dust etcetera and the pigeon feathers and the infinite static, parentheses parenthesised themselves by two bus stops, one for this way and one for the other, thus the universe is strapped to a rack and stretched in opposite directions.
PREVIEW OF Superpositions
Words of Praise
“Poetics as lit matches for a world on fire. Michael Sutton’s latest work is terrifyingly real, with its keen sense of imminence and knack for revealing behavioural strangeness and human (ir-)responsibility. Interestingly, humour weaves through the general seriousness/activism of these poems but, as Pound demanded, it too is willing to fight like tragedy. Cue the ‘glassgrime’ moaning of Hirst’s cow or Prince Phillip in dialogue with Titan, lampooned, vaudevillian, odd bedfellows finding one another via the ‘vice of vapidity’. Ultimately, as Sutton is aware, through these brilliantly eavesdropped and intimate snapshots of living, or attempting to live, the greater tragedy is bound up with our gesture as a humanity, our collective presence in the world. The language here is both physical and innovative. ‘I want to carry you into my mouth’ writes Sutton and into that dark void we go.”
- James Byrne, poet, translator and editor of The Wolf magazine (2002-2017)
“Michael Sutton offers a poetics of the clause superimposed with dangerous modifiers and a rich man’s portmanteaus. These poems skip through scenes, permeate partially actualized realities, and tease the poor lyric with interlaced collage, visual, and found text. The essence of poetry lingers in these remarkable fragments. And a voice emerges through and across the accumulation of formula, form, and foreign objects.”
- Gregory Betts; a Canadian poet, editor and professor at Brock University with a specialty in Canadian and avant-garde literature
Beir Bua Press 