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

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

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

robust pro aktiv quixotik goes evreewher is from evreewher nouns ar verbs verbs ar yu  a nu way uv intraktivitee langwage  th narrativ rocks  takes yu evreewher thers no conclewsyun  its in th going  poignant tragik ekstatik have anothr box top  meeting yu at th melting grange  th adventurs dont stop home keeps mooving  evn yu dont need 2 carree th props opn ths wun up each page fluid change  meeting yu in yu alive wundrful a great xperiens ths book.
bill bissett, author of Breth /the treez uv lunaria

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

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

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 Wonderland

Marcus Slease’s Mu (So) Dream (Window) lets in haunting landscapes where bodies and locations are in constant motion, dissolving and precipitating, presence and absence following each other’s shadow: 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

This poetry has seen a lot, has seen the world, but it catapults onward unjaded, grimy/sparkly, “huffing life.” If poetry is throught [thought/through/through it/rough/route/wrought] then Marcus Slease is on its tube train and he’s pulling out the stops, he’ll “unlatch/the room” you read in.
Catherine Wagner, author of Nervous Device

These deeply sound-based poems perform the linguistic athletics of English-to-English immigration: ‘I began in uh faild sosighity / with mushee piez / & fried pineappulz.’ This book dishes a sauce of green slime, trailers, ducktails, and fantasy: that of both sex and magic. The titles swirl with pop culture—Pretty in Pink, Body Snatchers, Beaches, Chariots of Fire—making the whole collection hum with non-sentimental 90s nostalgia, playful and pointing at the same time: Ronuld RAYGUN. This book is a delightful, full-bodied, fluid-rich study of how the past still exists in the present: ‘my bag / 4ever / uh rottun banana.
Laura Wetherington, author of A Map Predetermined and Chance

Slease refuses the comforts of rootedness, stability, permanence. In doing so, he represents what the philosopher Rose Braidotti identifies as the model of nomadic subjectivity “in flux, never opposed to a dominant hierarchy yet intrinsically other, always in the process of becoming, and perpetually engaged in dynamic power relations both creative and restrictive.
Piotr Gwiazda,  author of US Poetry in the Age of Empire

Marcus Slease offers a great deal in Play Yr Kardz Right.
Mike Topp, author of Happy Ending: The Selected Writings of Mike Topp

These are not merely some of the most extraordinary lyrics about central European urban realities since the death of the great Polish experimental poet Miron Bialoszewski. They are, simply put, some of the most extraordinary lyrics I have ever read about how to live with disciplined joy in the continual alienation that is urban life. Godzenie is a book about how to live in the midst of hardship by doing the only thing fully possible: reconciling the continual loss of the here with the continuous arrival of a now. So, here at last is the expatriot heir of Bialoszewski. Strange that he should be Irish. Fitting that he should write with a mind as laminar, with a heart as wise, with lines as strange, as his predecessor.
Gabriel Gudding, author of Literature for Nonhumans

Word ruptures: watching the words watching the mind write the words write the mind’ – this is an extract from the final section of Marcus Slease’s Godzenie and it would be hard to find a more apt description of his modus operandi as he trawls through the funny, frightening, sexy, sterile, prosaic, surreal, boring, brutal and tender landscape of 21st century post-communist Poland. Slease is in his element as he shows us the ghost in the boat, the loud sausages and the bottomless prayers of a country in a state of flux. A marvellous debut collection.
Geraldine Monk, author of They Who Saw the Deep

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