Released 31st August, 2025 // 186 pages // 978-1-917617-34-5 // RRP: £13.99 / $19.99 / €16.99
Geoff Gilbert and Alex Houen’s See You Through: A Novel is a formally restless, genre-collapsing hybrid that inhabits the threshold between poetry and fiction. Structured around a shifting dialogue of voices and modes, the book navigates illness, intimacy, war, bureaucracy, and facial recognition technology with a syntax that veers between the lyrical and the analytic, the fragmentary and the fluid. Language becomes a site of both fracture and connection, as the text resists linear narration in favour of a porous, polyphonic architecture. What emerges is a work that holds complexity with conviction: self-aware, searching, and structurally bold.
PRAISE for See You Through:
It’s quite wonderful, properly strange, a totally absorbing phenomenology of desire, memory, being-in-the-world, with the additional dimensions of constructed matter, constricted vision, soft bodies and their alter-octopods, gaps and openings and pain and sadness, and everywhere a knowing but wrenching lyrical innocence bursting into sideways ironic glances at it all.
— Ian Patterson
Fingering ‘the crack / between what happens and what is’, Houen and Gilbert’s poem-novel See You Through is a totally new kind of poem, which is also a totally new kind of novel. Written in lockdown and online, the narrative pitches its tent amidst the ‘sumptuary destruction’ of surveillance capitalism and pandemic. Don’t just read it for the story; remember the tenderness of sea creatures and boys.
— Andrea Brady
ABOUT Geoff Gilbert & Alex Houen:
Geoff Gilbert was born in Dunfermline in West Fife and now lives in France, where he works at the American University of Paris. He teaches, writes, and translates, and is currently completing a book on relations between writing and economics, called For Real.
Alex Houen was born in Oxford, England, grew up in Sydney, Australia, and teaches in Pembroke College and the Faculty of English, University of Cambridge. He co-edits with Adam Piette the poetry journal Blackbox Manifold. His research and writing interests include sacrifice, war literature, affects, and poets’ novels.
