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TOM BETTERIDGE – DRESSINGS
November 2019
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TOM BETTERIDGE – DRESSINGS
November 2019
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“Care is not organic”, begins Tom Betteridge’s Dressings, tracing this “tech/nology”, “all sorts”, a “chorus”, the care work done on and with the body. Gnarly and knotty, “its bruising / settlement” rarely settles for long, or without damage; yet damage has its attendant processes: those of suture for those of rupture, stitch for cut: “so each grain promises / to bind to an other another time”. Examining language and that thing we call a self in all its fleshly materiality, Dressings also analyses their mutual collapse, boundaries and leakage; “the matter of cut / time” in which poetry might figure both as wound and cure, poet as both doctor and patient, patiently touching on the diagnostic yet always turning-off road, shows us the new, troubling, surprising vistas that lie just round the corner.
the time left what’s left to hold harriedColour covers in gross-out pink; A5, saddle-stapled, 46 pages.
tense cycle hemmed in speech scrutiny
bedside duress grey light adore you
Tom Betteridge is the author of the poetry pamphlets Pedicure (Sine Wave Peak, 2017) and Body Work (Sad Press, 2018) and a critical book, Badiou, Poem and Subject (Bloomsbury, 2019). With Ellen Dillon he co-edited a feature on the poet Peter Manson for the Journal of British and Irish Innovative Poetry. He lives in London.
Review by Alice Hill-Woods here.