Overview

In RENDANG, Will Harris complicates and experiments with the lyric in a way that urges it forward. With an unflinching yet generous eye, RENDANG is a collection that engages equally with the pain and promise of self-perception. Drawing on his Anglo-Indonesian heritage, Harris shows us new ways to think about the contradictions of identity and cultural memory. He creates companions that speak to us in multiple languages; they sit next to us on the bus, walk with us through the crowd and talk to us while we're chopping shallots. They deftly ask us to consider how and what we look at, as well as what we don't look at and why. Playing eruditely with and querying structures of narrative, with his use of the long poem, images, ekphrasis, and ruptured forms, RENDANG is a startling new take on the self, and how an identity is constructed. It is intellectual and accessible, moving and experimental, and combines a linguistic innovation with a deep emotional rooting.

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9781783785599

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Reviews

Graceful and, at times, devastating -- Books of the Year * Observer * Will Harris takes British poetry into new waters: RENDANG is an astonishing debut. These questing poems rend and render, they tear and they give. Slipping between the everyday and the unreal, between crystalline lyric and a roving, essayistic expansiveness, their shapeshifting delves into the self and its precarious foundations... Many are heart-stopping: the kind of poem that makes you put down the book for a while just to breathe -- Sarah Howe, winner of the T.S. Eliot Prize Harris's poems turn the utterance back to ourselves, opening a dialogue between us, our modernity, the depth of our loss and the weight of our remembering. Where epithets rend memory from the moment, the artefacts of wounds heal themselves through a weft of irony, weaving language into a hard-earned scar -- Sandeep Parmar The best... With withering sleight of hand, Harris takes facile expectations of poets of colour and gleefully turns them inside out... These poems are disquisitions on the labour of poet-making, the delicate task of constructing a persona both on and off the page in a culture market currently inclined to reduce you to your ethno-cultural background... RENDANG is a wonder, and we are lucky to have it' * Poetry London * RENDANG offers sonorous, capacious, porous poetics. This is poetry that sings * DURA * Harris's witty and eloquent debut won the Felix Dennis Prize for best first collection, and is shortlisted for the TS Eliot award. The scenes he draws, from dreams and real life, are captivating and inhabit a broad range of forms between which this young poet moves with grace -- Books of the Year * Financial Times * Sets the standard for modern poetry * Lit Hub * Harris writes with a piercing clarity and intelligence, his voice warm as it crisply ruminates on big issues such as our shared cultures and identities, as well as more intimate moments * Guardian * There isn't a single poem in this collection that isn't cut through with sardonic humour and an absolutely unique, sideways-glancing tone * Poetry Review *

Author Information

Will Harris is a London based poet of Anglo-Indonesian heritage. He's the author of the critically acclaimed Mixed-Race Superman and All This is Implied, winner of the LRB Bookshop Poetry Pick for best pamphlet. In 2016, he was part of an Evening Standard feature on the 'new guard' of London poets; he was shortlisted for the 2017 Fitzcarraldo Essay Prize, and the 2018 Forward Prize for Best Single Poem for 'SAY' (Poetry Review). He has published with the Guardian, the London Review of Books, Granta, The Poetry Review, and The White Review, among many others.

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