Dear All,
Hope you are all keeping well.
KFS has just published Robert Sheppard's 'Words Out of Time': http://www.knivesforksandspoonspress.co.uk/wordsoutoftime.html
Words Out of Time deforms and reforms a story of Sheppard’s life as an othering, an ‘autrebiography’, in modes that include what he calls ‘unwriting’, working through and transforming diaries and journals. The Given tells it in four different ways, from a litany of what hasn’t been remembered, to an alphabetical disfigurement of its features. Arrival invents a demonic sibling, generated from the diaries, restlessly inhabiting lyrics, a short story, an essay and footnotes. In When Sheppard goes conceptual with ‘With’, while ‘Words’ weaves abandoned (found) texts to shake up this history; ‘Work’ distends temporality, reverses standard autobiography’s fascination with origins, slows down time to show how work works its way into a life.
On one level this is one of the most accessible and readable works Sheppard has produced; it’s also one of the strangest in its quiet subversions and playfulness, its self-questioning and self-awareness.
Rupert Loydell
I should have read your book already and I liked everything about it. There you are characteristically free of flash or reserve and it increases the sum of what can be written about I think. And it’s funny.
Kelvin Corcoran
In this intricate work (The Given) the poet asks: ‘Why does experimental writing demand experimental reading?’ The answer lies partly in the way in which, by bearing witness to another’s reorganisation of self, one might also find oneself reorganised in new and surprising ways.
Scott Thurston
This is a compressed autobiography, but unlike most autobiographies, it doesn’t hide the fact that the life-story it tells is invented by the very language used to tell the story…This is an impressive piece of work, but it’s only one small piece of the output of this prolific and inventive writer, who is always looking for new ways to extend poetic expression, and whom most contemporary poets could learn something from.
Alan Baker
Many thanks,
Alec Newman.
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