Released February 28th 2022 // 978-1-915079-35-0 // 38 pages
In his new pamphlet Samuel Tongue explores the troubled marriage between sexuality and religion, ecology’s slow erasure from a planet in decline and the hybridity of life and death. These are poems which look at what faith offers to human causes, both political and personal, in a beautiful world ravaged by ugly gods.
PRAISE for The Nakedness of the Fathers:
Samuel Tongue’s The Nakedness of the Fathers dexterously surveys the monster of capitalism via jaywalks, googleearth the ‘contagiousness’ of treadmills, sanitiser-slick supermarkets and the charade of prosperity. This is a landscape poetry ready and able to utilise the personal as a site of resistance, where father’s cry for ‘a mother in the dark’ and the world exists precariously, ‘a flux of ever-living fire.’ Linguistically rich and yet, where need be, capable of serrated directness, Tongue skillfully drifts through a network of forms. Impressively dialogic, at its heart, The Nakedness of the Fathers is a conversation made with others, from Derrida to Sontag. Crucially, Tongue is able to metabolise the complexities of violence whilst letting language have its say, maintaining a dignified tone against injustice. This is a learned poetics that is distinctly humane, communal and beautifully written.
— James Byrne, The Caprices
top of page
£6.50Price