Lies Blurring Here by Adam Piette is a richly textured, formally various collection that thinks through dream, memory, and perception as mutable states where self and world repeatedly unfasten. Moving between nocturnes, necropastorals, ekphrastic sequences, and lyric meditations, the book is steeped in intertextual conversation, from Apollinaire and Dickinson to Kafka, Dante, Sappho and Lully, yet remains acutely local in its attention to Derbyshire walks, domestic rooms, and specific weathers. Piette’s language is intricate and sonic, alive to etymology, pun, and echo, while the poems’ architectures create lattices of recurrence and slant return. Throughout, the work tests how consciousness is patterned by history, art, and technology, and how grief, love, and political unease register in the smallest shifts of light or sound. Lies Blurring Here is a dense, luminous, and deeply relational poetry of thinking and feeling in motion.
 
PRAISE for Lies Blurring Here:
Where has Adam Piette been hiding his prodigious poetic talent all this time? Hot on the heels of his compelling CCCLXV (Crater Press) he gives us Lies Blurring Here. It’s another corker. Piette glides through the world of nature and myth with the dreamlike quality of a somnambulant visionary gathering bouquets of observations and meditations. As he himself writes in one of the poems ‘translating life by chance, this art of margin’. Precisely. Inspiring stuff. More please!
— Geraldine Monk
 
Adam Piette’s Lies Blurring Here is a masterful inquiry into the nocturnal dreamscape where perception reaches its breaking point. These anti-pastorals – or necro-pastorals – move beyond simple nostalgia or existential melancholia toward a clinical, precise gaze that unravels the world’s phenomenological tapestry. The inquiry centres on a peripatetic speaker: an obsessive archivist of the now. This hermeneutic mind takes every fragment of reality, doubts it, and filters it through the private sieve of the skin – the very pores of being – separating the essential from the dross only to fuse them anew. The result is a third thing: a threshold reality that is both unforgivingly painful and strangely joyful. The Piette dialectic births a new epistemology driven by a hypersensitive awareness of the beyond. These elegies confront non-being directly, transforming the invisible into something visible, sensual, and world-shattering.
— Ágnes Lehóczky
 
In Lies Blurring Here, Adam Piette brings the same microscopic attention to the sounds and structures of language as he does to the lives of animals, minerals, plants and other humans. It’s a book without ego, filled with the most magical acts of imaginative identification with absolutely everything and the gods and particles which lie beneath. Its music would be the envy of any troubadour.
— Peter Manson
 
ABOUT Adam Piette:
Adam Piette is the author of the poetry collection, CCCLXV (Crater Press), the monographs Remembering and the Sound of Words: Mallarmé, Proust, Joyce, Beckett, Imagination at War: British Fiction and Poetry, 1939-1945, and The Literary Cold War, 1945 to Vietnam, co-edits the international poetry journal Blackbox Manifold with Alex Houen. He is Professor of Modern Literature at the University of Sheffield.