RIDES

My new book is just out! YIPPPIEEE!! Started this in 2008 when I first came to London. Picked it up again in 2012 after coming back from living in Poland and Turkey. It was poems written at tube stops around London. Then poems written on the circle line in London. Finally it became poems written on trains all over the U.K. Sitting backwards on the way there. Sitting forwards on the way back. Some real. Some imagined. What’s the difference? Super happy to have Blart Books publish it. Super happy!! Check it out!! Grab a copy!! It’s poetry for pirates!

Bernadette Mayer, Ted Berrigan, Ron Padgett are some of the influences. 


A little more about the book over at H_ngm_n (where some of the poems were also published):

http://h-ngm-n.tumblr.com/post/86997117895/this-poem-this-monster-marcus-slease

Rides

Marcus Slease

“There is only seeing and, in order to go to see, one must be

a pirate” said Kathy Acker. This is pirate literature. On a train.
Partly inspired by Ted Berrigan’s Train Ride from 1971,

Rides has a reality hunger. A mash up of memories and 

observations on train rides all over the U.K.

“A moving stage theatre,” 

“A special mission with a Mormon bodybuilder,” 

“A donut the size of your face called the TexASS.”

The speaker is “staging the room for their own pornography.”
Nicole Kidman and Tom Cruise make a special appearance in their epic blockbuster Far and Away on a train from Brighton. Natalie Portman’s dress appears on a train to Brighton. The “psycho southeast harbor” of Folkestone is an inferno of the shirtless being stuffed with chips. In Norwich children slide down a slide into a graveyard.The soundtrack is Pussy Riot and The Raincoats. Rides is a sad romance. “A gravy moat with mash potatoes in the middle.” Personal and personable, the speaker of these poems doesn’t “want to be

clever” they just want “to be real.” Domestic expansive and full

of truth nuggets: “If you paint a person / with house paint

they will live / if you don’t paint / the bottom of their feet.”

Here’s Marcus reading a selection from Rides

£7.00

 

Available over here: http://blartmagazine.jimdo.com/blart-books-1/2014/