Stuart McPherson’s The Aureate Trophies of Profit & Loss is a furious, darkly surreal excavation of life under late capitalism, rendered in a language that seethes, mocks, and mourns. Across aphoristic fragments, grotesque satire, and elegiac lyric, McPherson constructs a world of bureaucratic violence, ecological collapse, and psychic fragmentation, where corporate jargon mutates into a mode of dread. The collection’s dissonant, propulsive style refuses stability, creating instead a poetics of overload and corrosion, part rage diary, part ritual of defiance.
 
PRAISE for The Aureate Trophies of Profit and Loss:
Stuart McPherson's The Aureate Trophies of Profit & Loss signals a proto-scape of phantoms rising above a stricken Hylic Field never dimmed within their essence naturally inscripted by lingual nobility. 
   —   Will Alexander
 
The Aureate Trophies Of Profit & Loss is a book in which 'It is a question of living and therefore a question of entrapment'. In which infrastructure is entrapment, and language itself is recruited and brutalised against us. McPherson is engaged in a kind of restless interrogation with language, asking us what might be made from the remnants and discards of this 'bastardised' medium. Accordingly, this is an intensely vigilant collection, in which sharp, unsentimental attention is both the poetic mode and the presiding ethic. The writing is acute: between the 'fuckery and terror' we cut ourselves, we catch our breath. McPherson extends to us no consoling fictions, but functions instead as a repository for unspent incendiary energies. It is a beautifully bleak assessment. It is also a clarion call.
   —   Fran Lock
 
In this brilliant 'brittle octopus' of a book, the mere grandiloquence of mid-tier management is lifted to the level of horror B-movie. In a fit of hyperbole, McPherson’s lyrics pull themselves off the meathook of bureaucracy and dayjob, stumbling into a dazzling light that shucks another reality loose. And yet the superimpositions of organisational charts on our bodies and on the routines of childcare remain. Ornament curls against itself. McPherson’s aureate diction guts our gilded pretences to be 'modern' or even 'late.'
   —   Rob Kiely
 
ABOUT Stuart McPherson:
Stuart McPherson is a prize-winning poet and graphic artist whose work is influenced heavily by a lifelong involvement in the punk rock scene. His debut pamphlet, Waterbearer was published in December 2021, followed by the full-length Obligate Carnivore (Aug 2022) and End Ceremonies (Aug 2023), all via Broken Sleep Books. McPherson’s poetry often grapples with masculinity, the survival of everyday life and political issues within late capitalist structures. His work has appeared in various journals and has been performed across the UK.