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.
ABOUT GB Clarkson:
GB Clarkson is a poet of Irish heritage whose work has been anthologised in This Line is Not for Turning; An Anthology of Contemporary British Prose Poetry, ed. Jane Monson (Cinnamon Press, 2011), Furies: a Poetry Anthology of Women Warriors, ed. Eve Lacey (For Books’ Sake, 2014), The Valley Press Anthology of Prose Poetry, ed. Anne Caldwell (Valley Press, 2019) and Witches, Warriors, Workers: an anthology of contemporary working women’s poetry, ed. Fran Lock & Jane Burn (Culture Matters, 2020).
GB Clarkson - The Vitalist Sees the Signs
Released 31/10/2025
26 pages
5" x 8"
978-1-917617-40-6
RRP: £8.99 / $12.99 / €10.99