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SEAN BONNEY – GHOSTS
SEAN BONNEY – GHOSTS
Published October 2017
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Poems written in Berlin between September 2015 and the Summer of 2017. This pamphlet contains selected work from the pamphlet Cancer: Poems after Katerina Gogou, previously published in a limited edition, and an ongoing sequence entitled Our Death, as well as other pieces from the period. These are poems haunted by catastrophe, light, fires, the sun, violence and love. As Bonney writes: “We were talking about prophecy, about defeat and war, about how nobody knows what those words really mean, and what they will come to mean”. Drawing on writers like Baudelaire, Artaud, Anita Berber and Hölderlin like “marks on a calendar”, “a kind of cacophony”, or “the beginnings of a map”, these poems are vital indices of where we are.
“These days everyone is writing their final book. Whatever. I’ve lost everything as well. My body is made up of three needles, several coins, a system of nitrates and something wankers would call ‘a philosophy’. I see in the dark and like to smash mirrors. For many other people things are far worse.”
Sean Bonney’s previous books include Letters Against the Firmament (2015), Happiness (2011), The Commons (2011), Document (2008), Baudelaire in English (2007) and Blade Pitch Control Unit (2005). He currently lives in Berlin, where he is conducting postdoctoral research at the Freie Universität.