ANTIFREEZE
Keston Sutherland

This is the first full-length collection of work by Keston Sutherland, including Mincemeat Seesaw (1999), [Bar Zero] (2000) and a large number of new poems amassed before and since.

1-903488-25-7.  132 pp.  £8 / $12

Keston Sutherland teaches English literature and critical theory at the University of Sussex. He is editor of Quid and the Quid CD series and is currently editing the complete critical prose of J.H. Prynne. He has published numerous essays on poetics, politics and philosophy. Keston's poetry has been translated into French, German, English and Chinese, appearing in anthologies, journals and newspapers across the high art marginalese diaspora. He has given readings all over the world and is thus thoroughly metropolitan. He represented Great Britain in November 2005 at the French Biennale des Poetes at Val de Marne.

SEX CRATER


Lick the gag and lascivious flame fades,
I am shut it goes. Fastened to, snapped
shut by and stuck on her. She makes
up my life pitted for one instinct, see how
does this continuously, rubber shreds
and scandalizes the chewed glass the car
head out through the windscreen.
Her face goes on my leg. Broken
ice scattered in molten chrome glows,
xxxxxxxxxxxxx falsified the compact
xxxxxxxxxxxxx body you bargain
xxxxxxxxxxxxx away chip-eyed and wasted,
xxxxxxxxxxxxx so drunk the
street in an invisible ice-storm and
men and women entranced to a death-fad
go about nothing unheard. Delete the
exit every step of the routine reinscribes,
make a fresh end, link the shadow
vomited from the eye to an erotic highlight
went shut. Moth versus spaghetti: it
says here shut the thing open to greased
suggestions to the same contrary,
xxxxxxxxxxxxx as trusted the light shies,
xxxxxxxxxxxxx waving across
xxxxxxxxxxxxx her face and my single
xxxxxxxxxxxxx is a hit. But forever.

Review Quotes

"Somebody will always be opposed, -- how could Keston for instance set out in the course he has taken without expecting his poetry to be thoroughly loathed by unknown persons who feel delegated and reduced by it -- it positively courts such a reaction." --Peter Riley

"Keston Sutherland puts the gr in anger: and he's no ass without it."--Tom Raworth

"Keston Sutherland's poetry is malcontent, intelligent and beautiful, and I need more of it."--John Wilkinson

"Proud through savage daylight, grate, cross-hatch in suspicious pastel disallowed aches of CONSCIOUS METAL, belonging coils of alien swarf, belonging how it ever tightens to scientific talent on gracious curves. Deleted village whereof."--THF Drenching

'But seriously folks, if we are no longer to quite "suffer the privilege of being fully distracted," we are also failing more than ever to find ways to make the first person plural signify as an oppositional element. No plasticene plastique dabbler lacking all sense of consequnce, of the every day after, Keston Sutherland’s rage is sublimated into direct representations of the endlessly attempted substitutions of the personal and its desires for—everything. Sutherland doesn’t attempt to give us the real materials of the global economy, whatever the evidence might seem to suggest, but rather the infinite distortions which are our only access to it, and the errant, monstrously Gehry-like bits in which we might catch unanticipatable reflections: for Lear’s five 'never's, Mincemeat See-Saw's six 'rape's.' Mike Scharf, quoted in Allodox blog, 10 September 2003

'This, then, is ethically driving and driven work; but also work at great play.' --Pete Smith, The Gig

'The lines move rapidly, sonic patterns sharply burst, and the pages burn in your hands as you read them.'--Carol Mirakove, washington review

'rococo cutbacks and escape manoeuvres...' -Tim Morris in Jacket 8

'These are lines to snort up a rolled-up fiver...' -Tony Lopez in Stand n.s. 1.4 (Spring 2000).

Reviews of Keston's work

Jérôme Game, 'Energize! --The K Function, or an Anti-Freezing Speed' in Jacket 20, December 2002

Dylan Harris, on the Poetry Review reading at Whitechapel Art Gallery, 30 October 2003.

Andrew Duncan, Review of [Bar Zero] in Terrible Work

Articles

'A Short Critique of Pacifism' in Circulars, 23 February 2003

'Vagueness, Poetry' [a discussion of vagueness in poetic language] Quid 7c, 2001; reprinted in Works on Paper ed. Helen Slater 2002, and in the Prague Literary Review, 2003.

'Four Theses on Speed', Quid 12 

'For Carol Mirakove' Quid 11, 2002.

with Chris Goode, 'Six Bits of an Exchange', Quid 10iii

'Against Imperialism: A Prolegomena', Quid 9: Against Imperialism

'Nervous Breakdowns in Chris Emery's The Cutting Room' Quid 5, 2000.

'On the Accomplishment of Knowing One's Place' in The Poetry of Peter Riley, ed. Nate Dorward, The GIg 4/5 (Nov. 1999/Mar. 2000).

'Prosody and Reconciliation' The Gig, 2004.

'What's The Ugliest Part of Your Market-Researched Anaclitic Affect Repertoire?' [On Frank Zappa, the potential for a detournement of Freudian theory, and irrecuperable art], Militant Esthetix

(ed.), The Poetry of John Wilkinson [a collection of essays; forthcoming, Salt (Cambridge) 2004]