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9781917617208

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At first Port Folio feels like finding the lost pages of Tom Raworth's Logbook (it's that good), then it feels like listening to the funniest person you know improvising at gunpoint, derailing every narrative possibility as it emerges while still holding the room. If it stopped for a second to acknowledge the laughter, all would be lost, but on it goes, gleaning and garbling the most absurd gifts of our language environment, building to a kind of besieged intensity that manages (somehow) to be at once alarming, beautiful, hilarious and totally likeable. - Peter Manson Sammi Gale's blocks of prose poetry track and induce an unblocking, a sensitising of the skin where even cruel impressions glow like hieroglyphs. A child's vivid feel for texture transmutes into an adult's sensual apprehension, whether joyful or painful. A simple act like towelling dry on a beach unfolds whole life cycles from budding to ash, and language brushes the lips. - John Wilkinson Gale's business is the transfiguring of language and speech acts. A wine description, an educational tract, economic outlooks, power-lifting, some stern life advice. Here it all becomes prayer-like and incantatory - in that I feel protected by poetry when it hits this hard, shielded from received wisdom, secular pieties, ontological cliché, everything that tries to bring us down. Port Folio is more life-like than dream-like, but visionary in what it upends and disturbs. Gale's work also has this uneasy and vital engagement with masculinity that I found consoling, provocative and defiant. An artist. This is an enthralling sequence, and I didn't want it to end. - Luke Kennard A landlord's unexpected call ""chokes a bittercream out my stomach,"" an unsettled, ambient ""churning"" that articulates Port Folio as intimately and broadly as a voice, a cry that comes from the intestines. Here, in precarious housing that won't hold up, as far from the ""jetty"" and the ""rabbits"" as you can imagine, it won't stop. What won't? Answering this question, or being asked it, makes Sammi Gale's poetry, if it's poetry, stun. - Bhanu Kapil Port Folio is a bleak breeze - it reconfigures your head in the best possible way. - Isabel Waidner

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Sammi Gale is a writer, curator and the editor of Plinth. His poems and short stories have appeared in Datableed, Lighthouse, The Toe Rag, and The Colorado Review. His journalism features in GQ, the i Paper, and Little White Lies. He lives in London

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