The War of Leeroy Jenkins’ Ear is a restless, intellectually charged sequence that threads a cut-off ear through histories of empire, cultural inheritance, and the uneasy mechanics of narrative control. Moving between lyric shards and compact prose blocks, Joseph Persad braids Portobello, Columbus, heritage plaques, complaint systems, and the river Wandle into a language of drift and collision, where place names misbehave and institutional speech keeps trying to harden into “truth”. Refrains and returns, including a recurring engagement with Philip Guston, create a pressure system of echo and revision, while the book’s tonal range runs from fierce satire to intimate vulnerability. What emerges is a poetics of interference and complication, sceptical of mastery, alert to how power edits the story, and committed to keeping the text open to its own slips.
 
ABOUT Joseph Persad:
Joseph Persad lives and works in London.