Released 31st December, 2024 // 38 pages // 978-1-916938-65-6 // RRP: £8.99
Here in the forest, rife with collective hallucinations & mishaps, rumours & grudges, moon juice & gravel walking, anything is possible. The constant babble of elusive deer language keeps the inhabitants and reader sane, as deer fly and deep-sea dive, become fussy eaters and start chat show trends. The deer show us ourselves at our worst, best and most ridiculous in their pure nonsense/no nonsense way. After all, who hasn’t had plastic surgery to look like Andrei Tarkovsky without realising everyone else has done that too?
PRAISE for Some Deer:
In Vik Shirley’s supremely capable hands language becomes a playground, a laboratory, a lighthouse and a place where surprise becomes the glittering and life-enhancing norm. There are poetic earworms here that will hang around in your mind for a long time.
— Ian McMillan
Deer language, deer politics; their descents into hell (and back); the enigmas and the mayhem. The deer’s priest has escaped from a psych ward and isn’t really a priest. There’s a Nostradamus deer whose warnings go unheeded (country and western music festivals ensue, which have upon the deer a sobering chastity-belt-effect). It’s a reality so absurd we recognize it immediately. Equal parts whimsy and menace, Vik Shirley’s Some Deer is a strange treat.
— Michael Earl Craig
I got distracted from quality family time by the marvel of watching Vik Shirley saddle an anaphora to ride across page after page until Some Deer became the neon WWJD bracelet I wore through the latest vacuous neoliberal meltdown. In somewhere between a parable and a fable, some deer are studied by rabbits who resort to psychological methods. Vengeance is cinema. Voodoo is jumpsuits. Wrongdoers compete for prize money and the eternal subjectivity of a cave wall drawing. Tail wags instantiate social obligations and aristocratic portraits. Humanity cannot stand to look in the mirror, which is why deer appear to game the scenario. Drippy moon juice, Barry Manilow, and other zine-friendly objects intervene. Inspired by Kristofor Minta’s report of deer overpopulating his local Syracuse, these poems don’t abscond from the scene of sad rutting. Samuel Beckett created Krapp to think about being and remaining while fixating on the vidua bird and viduity. Agog, quivering like deer at Shirley’s disco, I thought again of how absurd we are. And how thrilling to see it so written and ridden.
— Alina Stefanescu
ABOUT Vik Shirley:
Vik Shirley is a poet and writer from Bristol now living in Edinburgh. Her books include Corpses (Sublunary Editions) and The Continued Closure of the Blue Door (HVTN). She has a PhD in Dark Humour and the Surreal in Poetry from the University of Birmingham. Vik co-edits Surreal-Absurd for Mercurius and Firmament online for Sublunary Editions. Her work has appeared in such places as Poetry London, PN Review, and Dreaming Awake: New and Contemporary Prose Poetry from the United States, Australia and the United Kingdom (MadHat).
