For the launch of an American Book of the Dead: A Wild West Séance join a quartet of similarly-spun writers emerging from a poetry tradition of spirit talkers and unseasoned hauntology.
Photo by Anonymous Bosch
Doors: 7:15. The event will start at 7:30
Published by Broken Sleep Books, James Byrne will also be launching a new work, The Overmind alongside Camille Ralphs who will read from her celebrated 2024 Faber collection After You Were, I Am. Gregory Leadbetter will read from Maskwork and The Fetch (both Nine Arches Press), Balanuve (Broken Sleep Books) and Caliban (Dare-Gale Press), together with new work, and Kirsten Norrie will show a short film with readings from Ravage: An Astonishment of Fire (Bloodaxe, 2023) and her debut novel: An American Book of the Dead, a unique Acid Western set in the mid to late 1800s whose psychedelia stems not from drugs but from the spirit world.
James Byrne is a poet, editor, translator and visual artist. His co-translation with the author Ro Mehrooz of Rohingya poems, Poems Written Through Barbed-Wire Fences, is published by Arc in November 2024. At the Horse Hospital, he will be launching The Overmind (2024, Broken Sleep Books), a book that attempts to see the world through the skin of a jellyfish after being hit by a 60ft truck in NYC. 'Mythogeographic, linguistically adept and restlessly explorative of social and personal space, The Overmind is Byrne’s seventh full collection of poems and his most powerful work to date.'
Camille Ralphs is a poet and critic, and an editor at the Times Literary Supplement. Her first collection of poems, After You Were, I Am, was published by Faber and Faber in March 2024. Her poems and essays have appeared in numerous magazines, including the New York Review of Books, The Poetry Review and the Los Angeles Review of Books, and she teaches at the University of Oxford.
Gregory Leadbetter is a poet and Professor of Poetry at Birmingham City University. His books and pamphlets of poetry include Caliban (Dare-Gale Press, 2023), a New Statesman Book of the Year 2023; Balanuve, with photographs by Phil Thomson (Broken Sleep, 2021); Maskwork (Nine Arches Press, 2020), longlisted for the Laurel Prize 2021; The Fetch (Nine Arches Press, 2016), and The Body in the Well (HappenStance Press, 2007). Recent work for the BBC includes the extended poem Metal City (Radio 3, 2023). A song-cycle featuring poems from The Fetch by the composer and pianist Eric McElroy has been performed internationally, and a recording with the tenor James Gilchrist was released in 2023. As a critic he publishes widely on the history and practice of poetry, and his book Coleridge and the Daemonic Imagination was awarded the University English Book Prize 2012.
Kirsten Norrie is a writer, artist and musician who is currently the Judith E. Wilson Poetry Fellow at Cambridge University. Her work has appeared in the Guardian, the Scotsman, the TLS and the Quietus as well as on BBC Radio 3 Late Junction and The Verb. Published by Bloodaxe Books in the UK, she has taught at the Royal College of Art, Edinburgh College of Art and Oxford University.