Neocosis
Keston Sutherland

"In a fast-moving, intelligent, visceral and sensual style, he considered what humanity, love and desire can be or become in a globalised and violently unjust world; the work seemed simultaneously hard-headed and impossibly tender. Sutherland's latest pamphlet, Neocosis explicitly addresses current events, their actors and their covert and overt effects.

... Within Sutherland's grotesque cabaret, we encounter many real-life characters, such as Roger Ailes, the genius of Republican-biased television since the Nixon era, now head of Fox; Albert Wohlstetter, advocate of precision bombing and limited nuclear war and Michael Levin, an NYU professor who advocates torture.

Sutherland's poetry is nearer to scratch video than heroic couplets, farcically remixing the conventional metaphors of political discussion, sampling bin Laden and the chatter of Fox-dominated radio frequencies and wrestling self-consciously with his vestigial literary options. It is ferociously complex; he is picking apart those awkward details and ideas that we don't often find in the media. But his poetry's questions - how to write about (and live within) a reality of money, massacre, media ownership, geopolitics and individual impotence - are clear enough. If you want to know what a committed but undogmatic poetry might look like in the era of Gitmo and Abu Ghraib, this is one place to start." --Robert Potts, "Life, remixed", Sunday February 12, 2006, The Observer

"I think it's quite a common experience for poets to realise, at some point in their lives, just how little of what moves them in the world actually finds its way into their poems.  No matter how elastic your medium, a gulf opens between the things in your life that tend to become poems and the things that don't.  If you accept this as a problem, there are two ways round it.  You can choose to do something else, maybe write journalistically, in order to keep the space marked poetry uncorrupted.  The alternative is to try to find hidden properties of the medium itself which allow it to transcend its acquired limitations. Keston Sutherland's medium has always been more elastic than most, but when I think of his new book Neocosis I'm reminded of the moment in William Burroughs' The Soft Machine where the protagonist walks in on an ether party with a lighted cigarette.  Most drugs, like most foods, can be burned as well as digested: the chemistry's much the same, but the power, the energy transferred per unit of time, is vastly increased.  Neocosis is cut from the same stuff as Keston's earlier poetry, but the interactions among its material parts are ramped up to a level where they become self-sustaining, at least partly beyond the author's control, drawing in and on an informed self, wired to every possible source and sink of information in a world where truth equals shit at the very moment when the elastic snaps, leaving us with a face full of spare ribs and throat gristle.  It's one of the most astonishing collaborations of mind and material I've ever known.  And so is Keston." --Peter Manson, Cambridge, 16 February 2006

also by Keston Sutherland:

Neutrality
The Rictus Flag  
Antifreeze
[Bar Zero]
Mincemeat Seesaw
Girls at Trusion
Hate's Clitoris and Other Poems
At the Motel Partial Opportunity
So Sung Visitor Soh
Have Wishly
other books published elsewhere

Some poems available online

'Ejector Vacua Axle ' in Masthead

To purchase, send a cheque (include £1.00 postage
in UK, and $4.00 to US or Canada) to:

Barque Press
70A Cranwich Road
London N16 5JD UK

Contents: 'Falling in Love Cream Crab';
'Roger Ailes'; 'Torture Lite'; 'The Food at
Alcove One'.

1-903488-47-8. December 2005. 24 pp.
£4.00 / $6.00

 

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.

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]

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