Marcus Silcock

Surreal-Absurd Prose Poetry

Dream Dust

“That’s not a dream, she says, it happened. Yes, I say, my dreams are all nostalgia. They are all in the past. Happened or not happened, I say. Sweaty sex with slippery dildos. Wooden porch with whiskey and rocking chair. Built to Spill on the stereo. I’m 50. She’s 40. We wait for a hamburger from Big Al’s. The hamburger is late by a few decades. You are only honest in the bedroom, she says.”- from Dream Dust

The Wildness

When I read a Marcus Slease poem I am reminded that the world is made up of billions of parts, each with their own soul, each with a great ability to illuminate the sacred while also misbehaving. Slease is a poet who reminds us the wildness of life is not something we can control or even fight against but rather something we should witness and honour.
– Matthew Dickman, author of Husbandry

The Alien Memory Machine

The traveler of Godzenie hallucinates from his diamond hotel bed a bestiary of memories while simultaneously tapping into the post-communist Polish now. We encounter the terror and kitsch of a folk subconscious as found in the house of the frog, where we meet Mrs. Vogel to the tunes of George Michael and a whiff of boiled kapusta. Marcus Slease’s playful travelogue carries us through this foreign landscape in the same breath he also addresses the stranger that is the self, writing a mirror through which we may enter his inner Poland. This reconciliation of the inner and outer might be the godzenie of the title, the alien memory machine and robot heart of a town whose shape on the map is unmistakably human.
– Amy King, author of The Missing Museum

The Crazy Hot Dish

Say Lydia Davis And Donald Barthelme Had A Son, And His Life Story Was Painted By Basquiat, And The Paintings Were Ground Up Into A Spice, Then Used To Flavour A Crazy-Hot Dish You Just Can’t Stop Eating While The Scenery Shifts Around You: That Taste Might Be Something Like Never Mind The Beasts.
– Ruby Cowling, Author Of This Paradise

The Demand to Love

Writing actually as love! Marcus Slease’s crinkling, crackling prose is full of sparks, full of troubles, full of wonder. Never Mind the Beasts radiates with the force, brevity and immediacy of stylists like Mary Robison, Rikki Ducornet and Diane Williams. “The demand to love,” wrote Roland Barthes at the beginning of Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes; “overflows, leaks, skids, shifts, slips”. “Writing to touch with letters, with lips, with breath,” wrote Hélène Cixous in Coming to Writing. These are the thrilling, vibratory spaces, movements and possibilities Slease’s writing opens up.
– Colin Herd, author of You Name It

The Dreamscapes

Slease’s work, like that of Kharms, is absurdist but rooted in the quotidian. In The Green Monk, the magical and the mundane exist not in opposition but in symbiosis. In ‘Black Hole’, a mysterious bearded man enters a ‘wooden restaurant’, but the true center of negative gravity is ‘an 80s microwave’ which emerges as a bijou dimensional portal. The Green Monk is a fantastic book, the work of a writer with great technical artistry, but a writer who deploys that artistry with subtly and restraint.

– Tom Jenks, author of A Long and Hard Night Troubled by Visions

Curious, Cosmopolitan, and Compassionate

Marcus Slease’s gentle & generous engagements with the ephemera of almost-everyday life, coupled with a variant of bill bissett’s Lunarian English, and a sensuous, curious, cosmopolitan, and compassionate world-view, make this happily humble beautifully-modulated everything collection—without any shadow-of-a-doubt—my book of the year. For 1973 and for 2017.
– Tim Atkins, author of On Fathers < On Daughtyrs

The Warmth of You

The foreign desert is encountered by its sand blowing through a muted city, delivery food and Rumi are found left on the doorstep, the taste and warmth of “you” are dissolving on the tongue. Here, writing becomes an act of tracing, in which all presences are intensified in their muted, bodily foreignness.
– Jiyoon Lee, author of Foreigner’s Folly: A Tale of Attempted Project

The Bamboozling

Elusive and allusive, by turns funny, moving and bamboozling, and with prose so slippery and shining it makes your cerebellum tingle. A really beautiful book of poet’s prose
– Will Ashon, author of Passengers

The Green Monk

PSYCHIC MARMALADE

The Green Monk is a dreambox or a sweatbox of a sugar skull. A black hole full of hairspray and cigarette butts where the deer are twitching. It is the great urn of space dust where yellow yolk drips down the wall. These poems are migration and immigration across various physical and imaginary, spatial and temporal, fields; journeys, healings, and transformations; the illusions of self that each new self is born into.

Written between London, Madrid, and Krakow, it engages thrillingly with various surrealist visions of artists and poets, including Leonora Carrington, Salvador Dali, García Lorca, James Tate, and Chika Sagawa. It concerns, variously, erotics, animism and magic; food, death and sublime nature; fairy tales and alchemy, mixed up with the wonders of everyday life. It is simultaneously contemporary and ancient, built on visual images and techniques of juxtaposition and collage, into entertainingly absurd narratives.

NEVER MIND THE BEASTS

POST PUNK POETICS

Marcus Slease’s ‘Never Mind the Beasts’: probably the wildest bildungsroman since ‘Anti-Oedipus’; imagine Joyce’s ‘Portrait…’ being retold by a Leopold Bloom on a mission to steal back epiphanies from standarized marketing. An essential, liberating read.
– Matt Travers, broke Mayakovsky fan

Stylewise it would appeal to fans of both abrupt American Lydia Davis and Soviet absurdist Daniil Kharms . . . A Portrait of the Artist for the Tyskie and Kimchi generation.
– Robert Greer, Review in Idler magazine (issue 75)

PLAY YR KARDZ RIGHT

It is the small magnified up into the infinite. Over the course of the work, the use of a childlike wonder allows the poetry to expose deeper held truths within the world. A direct path to the reader comes into play, letting the work feel as natural as the way people speak to one another. With “Play Yr Kardz Right” Marcus Slease writes using a language all his own, allowing for mere snippets of story to flow their way into the greater stream of consciousness style. Not quite poetry, not quite prose, Marcus Slease goes for a unique balancing act one that feels so lively.

Beach Sloth, author of Mark’s My Friend