The Vitalist Sees the Signs is a sly, searing, and spectacularly inventive sequence from GB Clarkson, where each poem casts its eye on the absurd, the divine, and the intimately strange. The Vitalist, an electrified poetic persona, moves through funeral parlours, bogs of misogyny, literary sojourns with George Eliot and John Donne, and surreal maritime metaphysics, collecting grief, insight, and an ever-mutating philosophy of survival. With fierce humour and fierce tenderness, Clarkson turns language inside out, making space for the sacred, the disobedient, and the deeply felt. This is a poetry of hauntings and high style, of jam sandwiches and apocalyptic insight, of devotion and delight. To read The Vitalist Sees the Signs is to wake to the world’s weirdness again, renewed, altered, ablaze.