Website of the writer Marcus Slease
Terrific review of Never Mind the Beasts in Idler magazine by Robert Greer.
“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.”
Terrific review by Tom Jenks of my book The Green Monk. You can read it over at Stride magazine. Lydia Davis, Daniil Kharms. Yes please!
The Green Monk is available from Boiler House Press. It has a very nice design. Good to touch. And also read.
“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.” For many years now this “world alien,” as he jokingly calls himself in the interview with Wetherington, has been writing poems that celebrate flexible identity and mobile imagination. Equally introspective and retrospective, Play Yr Kardz Right beautifully illustrates his nomadic poetics” (Piotr Gwiazda in Jacket 2).
The literary scholar, translator, and poet Piotr Gwiazda wrote a very thoughtful review of my nomadic surrealist work, especially Play Yr Kardz Right.
Also, there is a nice pic of Desperate Literature bookshop. Madrid’s answer to Shakespeare and Company in Paris and where Play Yr Kardz Right was launched.
The review of my work, entitled”Nomad Life,” is available over here at
Jolly good journeys with trio of surreal-absurd readings with launch of my book Puppy. Also Rhubarb by Tom Jenks and Vik Shirley’s Grotesquerie for the Apocalypse. Thank you to Michelle Moloney King and Beir Bua Press for organising.
Online reading and launch of Puppy (Marcus Slease), Grotesquerie for the Apocalypse (Vik Shirley), and Rhubarb (Tom Jenks) this coming Friday Nov 26th 2021.
A Surreal-absurd feast!
Grab you free tickets here
Puppy is being launched and celebrated with two other terrific books and writers next Friday 26th November 8PM UK time.
A Surreal-absurd evening with Marcus Slease, Tom Jenks, and Vik Shirley.
Come join us!!! Free tickets for the online event here
My new book Puppy is available now from Buir Bua Press.
Here is a short reading from the opening few pages.
Written during lockdown in Spain. Welcome to the world of Puppy.
Words of Praise
“This gentle series of prose poems follows the adventures of a young dog and his boy as they negotiate life in a small Spanish town during the pandemic lockdown. In Marcus Slease’s world, Puppy is everywhere, like the proverbial jewel of interdependence in the Buddhist image of Indra’s Net that opens the book. This net reminds us that “no one knows where the soul sits.” Is it everywhere or is it nowhere, here or not here? On the way to find out, Puppy and boy romp through a range of everyday objects (urine, sand, wood) and not so everyday references (the New Testament, Greek Mythology, the music of Bach and Max Richter). Can they reconcile the domestic and the wild? Like so much of Slease’s writing, this book is at once ludic, lucid and profoundly welcoming.” – Peter Jaeger, author of Postamble : For an Invisible Sangha
“Feel the heat, the distance. The need for puppy. The awe at puppy. Slease walks his puppy along a threadbare path between knowing and not knowing – flashes of wisdom jump up at you from the puppy dog panting of ‘just trying to hold on’. Slease leads you into his worlds easily and it feels all right, anecdotal, familiar. The rhythm hooks, the pace builds. You’re dizzy. Something has happened to you but you’re not sure what. The person who enters the book is not the same as the person who leaves.” – Lydia Unsworth, poet (Mortar, Some Murmur, Certain Manoeuvres), based between Manchester and Amsterdam
“Whatever you do, do not chase the puppy. The puppy will come to you. The puppy will choose you. You can never own a puppy. But you can live with one. The puppy will teach you new tricks and remind you that each moment exists to be fully inhabited. Marcus Slease’s Puppy is a dog manual. A how to. A book not for the future or the past but for the present. For the right here and now. A puppy knows how to live. And so do you.” – Stephen Emmerson, author of Dungeness
Happy to have some new prose poems around a wee campfire softly odd and peaceful.
“Ghost Pimple” and “Call of the Wild.” Check em out over in the new issue of Ligeia.
“I think the poems I really love are the ones where the thought is happening (or being reanimated) in front of you.”— Luke Kennard
Some terrific twisters of surreal-absurd poems by Luke Kennard over at Mercurius.
“My favourite Absurdist poetry is the kind that pulls you into a dreamlike situation, and makes you question what is real, what isn’t, and whether that even matters.”—Jenna Clake
This week’s surreal-absurd sampler is a doozy over at Mercurius
“These poems are from a manuscript I’m working on called The Vogue for Flatness, so we’re still learning about one another. Poems for me are a way to filter the world, to make sense of it, to live in it. Perhaps it’s having been raised in suburbia or a childhood steeped in comics and cable TV, but there seems to me no other honest way to do this than through the surreal, absurd, and grotesque.” – Judson Hamilton
The surreal-absurd world of our evolving technology. Over here at Mercurius.
“touching my dancing hands like a robot
back walking
that I don’t feel too sorry for
but I know the cold that’s hitting me
was hitting my face to the claws “
Terrific surreal-absurd sampler of Patricia Farrell over here at Mercurius.
This surreal absurd sampler is a nice combo. Some psycho-sexual Bird King poems from James Knight and art from Alex Stevens.
Check em out over here at Mercurius.
Never Mind the Beasts