Occupational Phenomena by Henry St Leger is a razor sharp pamphlet that turns the language of job interviews, productivity culture and corporate aspiration into a theatre of surreal dread. Framed through familiar recruitment questions, these poems and prose pieces expose work as fantasy, coercion, performance and slow apocalypse all at once, where CV gaps become liberation myths, children dance through burnout, and ambition mutates into something monstrous and absurd. St Leger’s voice is deadpan, funny and quietly furious, drawing on sci-fi, tech culture and classed experience to show how the future of work is already deforming the present. This is a brilliant, unsettling pamphlet about labour, selfhood and the strange violences hidden inside professional speech.
 
PRAISE for Occupational Phenomena:
A delightful and horrifying, endlessly inventive sequence on the fractal delusions of work and corporate culture, and what survives of us in spite of it.
— Luke Kennard
 
An astutely satirical swing at the marketised dystopias of our neo-liberal moment. St Leger's vision of the near future captures, in full HD, the commodification of work, the fiendish fusing of identity and output, and the ever escalating alienation that results. Yet this world is brought to life with clear-sighted wit and tremendous imaginative force in ways that no machine could ever replicate.
— Fran Lock
 
ABOUT Henry St Leger:
Henry St Leger (he/they) is a poet, playwright, and occupational hazard, working as the Editorial Assistant at The Poetry Review. They hold an MA with Distinction from The Poetry School x Newcastle University, and had their poetry featured in the BAFTA-nominated video game Overboard! They previously worked as a technology reporter for TechRadar, The Independent, and NBC News, with live media appearances for BBC World News and Channel News Asia.