keston sutherland

Jokes is a crash course in psychic disintegration for the genocide generation. Ever wondered what a spoonbill thinks of peremptory norms? Or what a hippo can do with an egg-slice? What’s the secret of the success of men like David Papazian and Johnnie Moore, who get to run the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, while poetry-reading demographics, from the higher and intermediate managerial and professional occupations down to the footwells of unskilled manual self-erasure, lie around standing up for themselves and fornicating with the void? An Author’s a Joke, to all manner of Folk, wherever he pops up his Head, his Head, wherever he pops up his Head, according to Fielding. But why? The 27 jokes of Jokes unfold over the course of a duration-block, in an exclusive interior, under new management, in the capable trotters, paws, hooves, claws, tentacles, jaws, beaks, and blowholes of a fabulous parliament of beasts, some drunk, some dead, some leery, some high, some tender, in the tradition of Boccaccio or Isaiah. They are all funny.

Designed and typeset by Phil Baber.

A manual of meditations on grief blocked by trauma, pliers, goats, remedies, meaning, conduits, suicide, eggs, times, tutting, God, lifts, treasury tags, wrecking yards, Douglas Barrowman, involuntary spasms, front desks, manganese deficiency, weevil shit, Mr Sheen, coal potential, the bison, The Final Cut, tone of voice, trillions of cicadas, Elisabeth Koolaart-Hoofman, bogus antler cannibalism, the Preces Gertrudianae, parodies of communication, “Cary Grant’s Wedding,” the corruption of youth, a tripod or cable, Culverwell on the Vacuola, geese, Hemans’s line on Mary Tighe, annihilation, the proletariat, plastic bags, La Compiuta Donzella di Firenze, poetry, rooms, beheadings, S106 obligations, and planks. Containing single, double, triple, and sextuple sestinas, in the old mode of retrogradatio cruciata, and other canzoni, crushed to prose.

Scherzos Benjyosos is a set of four poems, scherzos in prosimetrical blocks, a comical, wild, and delirious sifting through the carnage of the financial crash, the dreamscapes of capitalist infancy, histories of sadism and persecution, the fetish bars of canonical literature, and the psychoanalysis of grass. The book also includes “Sinking Feeling,” Sutherland’s long poem from 2017, described by J. H. Prynne as “breathtakingly lovely, and desperate, racked with desire to become truthful love.”

Some reviews of other books by Keston Sutherland:
“[Hot White Andy] is the most remarkable poem in English published this century… A possible poetic future starts here.” — Jacket Magazine

“The most unsettling but also authentically hopeful account of what it is to be human now.” —3AM on The Odes to TL61P

“Immediately takes its place among the most essential works of literature in English in this new millennium.” — Chicago Review on Poetical Works 1999 –2015

“[‘Sinking Feeling’] moves like a piece of music through recursive and repeated moments, shifting and developing its described and conceptual spaces, its logics of representation, and its narrative. The thinking it follows is not always easy, but the disorienting effect on the reader is exhilarating because of the intellectual and emotional space it opens up as you try to follow it.” — London Review of Books