Published March 2017. Paperback, 90pp, 9 x 6ins
ISBN 9781848615380 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
Through incisive, intricate, explorative poems, SJ Fowler offers an ambiguous but often starkly humorous viewpoint into the pre-occupations of contemporary being. From incisions into the political and moral factionalism which so often dominates our online existence, to the more sincere negotiations of our private lives, our bodies and our minds, in love and in death. Fundamentally a statement about the Anthropocene, The Guide to Being Bear Aware is doing the work poetry is meant to do, offering more questions than answers.
and each life will have at least one moment of justice between it.
Two dates, that is all it is.
The Guide to Being Bear Aware marks a high point in SJ Fowler’s exploration of modern, literary poetry, incorporating a breathtaking sweep of international literary and philosophical influences and drawing deeply from the great poets of the European 20th century poetic tradition. With each poem in the collection headed by an epigraph, so these influences are declaimed or subverted, from Pablo Neruda to Plutarch, from Vladimir Mayakovsky to Liane de Pougy.
"A markedly original enterprise which carries with it another thrust – toward sharing, even collaboration – that has been central to much of his earlier work... It is all new as I read him, all special, and I’m drawn to follow him now wherever he takes us." —Jerome Rothenberg
"... advice for living in a world gone awry. Wry, violent, contemplative, political, intimate and raucous by turns, these are poems that laze on your lap only to get their claws in. Morphing into unfamiliar shapes beneath the watching eye, these refreshing, quizzical, well-traveled poems forge a world entirely their own: they won’t let you go of you easily.” —Sarah Howe
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