Description:
Some books feel like an open wound.
Here, set down in exquisite poetry, is a young man's story that for the reader feels like an act of trespassing. Our protagonist's journey begins brightly - a young boy standing at the edge of the world, eager and expectant, studying its beauty, revelling in the potential within himself. But drenched in feeling, he finds our world a violent home. Slowly, the body weakens, and the mind turns inward. What follows is both brutal and beautiful: a spectacle of suffering, poetry as both wound and salve. A precise and personal autopsy, that in so being, is strikingly universal.
In clear reverence for the writers who raised him - Plath, Sexton, Nabokov, Woolf, Pessoa - James transforms his most private journals into a study of the modern mind at its most honest, like a diary that was never meant to be shared.
Brief description: Richard James is a British poet whose work interrogates melancholy, identity, and existence through an enchanting confessional style. Inheriting the tradition shaped by Plath, Woolf, and Sexton, James' poetry uses formal precision and emotional intensity to reshape private experience into a universal meditation on living and peace, and articulating a contemporary queer perspective that is both unflinching and necessary.
Review Quotes:
"Raw, tender, and full of yearning, this is a collection that aches in all the right places"
- Chris Gill, author of The Nowhere
"Drink, don't drown."
- Tom Snarsky, author of Reclaimed Water