Description: Poetry. A beautiful, formidably intelligent yet profoundly inviting book, Alex Houen's much-anticipated RING CYCLE brilliantly orchestrates its many motifs across poems that move from the metaphysical to the intimate to the droll sometimes within one poem. Houen is a poet of lavish linguistic sensuality, his poems vibrating with his attunement to fissures within the self, between lovers; salutes to friends; romantic skirmish; the ambient dread of our moment. Houen's brilliantly mash-upping mind encompasses pirated DVDs, Dryden and Alexander McQueen, conceits poetic and contemporary and untimely and unheimlich. A book of enormous range, simultaneously lush and austere, RING CYCLE tracks the perversities of erotic and filial suspension alongside questions of conscience and aesthetics.
Brief description: Alex Houen is author of the poetry chapbook Rouge States (Oystercatcher, 2014), and co-author (with Geoff Gilbert) of another chapbook, Hold! West (Eyewear, 2016). He is co-editor of the online poetry magazine Blackbox Manifold and teaches modern literature in the Faculty of English, and Pembroke College, University of Cambridge.