Angels the Size of Houses by Aaron Kent
"This poetical collection, Angels the Size of Houses (70-plus sheets of cool and frantic paginated speech) is a buzzing and hyper-inventive set of multifarious devices, with exceptional prosodical hazardry and multiple re-echoes along its spacious corridors — with many doorways for we and us open to its flaring physiological recitatives. The passage construction is familial and domestic in tone-row, while also widely outlandish, saltarello-style and stylish also with it. There are culinary hints and self-displays in great lexical abundance to whet the whistle, with phantasm and modest astonishments in witty comedy, escaping grandeur but never remote from scalar enlargements, often wisely gnomic, gazing out of the window at continental drift and its markings. William Burroughs is reported to have replied, when asked his opinion about death, 'well it's a step in the right direction', obsequious in full funeral rigout, laburnum decor, with many choice aromas and childhood joys. Indeed alongside outbreaks of passionate attachment with parents and kids, the schedule is mostly immune to current political conflagrations and their drear localisms. The protocols display exceptional narrative candour, own-brand, also in white, offering vagaries of choice oddity, medical and arctic in well-tempered rational diffusion; anatomical by alternating reduction and upfront funny by marginal exploits; work and glancing damage on all sides, broken and 'racing to the bottom', where else.
Reading along and across these pages is unquestionable adventurism, rapid eye movements seem to catch up with and overrun occupational impatience, as dear reader in friendship you soon enough shall find out." —J.H. Prynne
"Every poem is a dizzy word-dazzle, a dance of images, expressing a real life of work, babies, love and loss. Some are shaped by word-music. Some scatter the page and the mind, stretching poetry to its limits, and leave me wondering. No bad thing." —Gillian Clarke
"Here, in this beautiful book, is the poetry of the possible. With words that are 'heaven sent and glitter prone', Aaron takes us on a journey that is as vital as it is extravagant, urging us into the fantastic, and turning our everyday scenes into glittering vistas. It is a collection to be dipped into again and again, one that leaps with language, and lends its readers fresh eyes." —Theophilus Kwek
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