Desiring Machines

Poems, like anxiety, attempt to contain what spills over, and to overflow what fits too tightly. In Desiring Machines, Andrea Brady’s vital, candid eighth collection of poetry, the language of crisis gapes and sings. These poems find breathing spaces within the minutes dilated by fear, the slow ticking of grief, rage stalled and wandering, the strangely activated temporalities of illness and pain, or the long cataclysm of climate emergency. In a world sick and on fire, this fierce and vulnerable book clings to life; to the consoling possibilities for continuing in love and solidarity. Midway through life’s journey, on the margins of a burning forest, we find ourselves in a clearing full of pulsing machines...

When the time comes you are holding on

to a facsimile of hope: that beneath your feet

there is a landing, vulnerable fruit caught

in a net; that the interval between struggle and arrival

is just space, empty space, no complexities.

This is another way of talking

about being born ...

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Andrea Brady is the author of eight books of poetry and two critical monographs, including Wildfire (2010), Mutability (2012), Cut from the Rushes (2013), The Strong Room (2016), The Blue Split Compartments (2021) and Poetry and Bondage: A History and Theory of Lyric Constraint (2021). She has held fellowships from the Leverhulme Trust and the National Humanities Center, and performed throughout Europe and in Canada, the United States, Lebanon and Chile. Her work has been translated into French, German, Spanish, Slovene, Slovak, Finnish, Greek, Catalan, and Croatian, and has been the subject of a large number of critical essays. She is Professor of Poetry at Queen Mary University of London where her research focuses on contemporary poetics and the early modern period. Andrea is the curator of the Archive of the Now and the co-editor (with Keston Sutherland) of Barque Press.

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