Overview

Some Things I Do Not Know is a luminous work of mourning, written after the loss of the author's best friend to suicide. These poems work their magic in the tension between knowing and not knowing, and in the grief of things unsaid. Allen explores with fearless honesty the ways in which we carry love and absence forward - into the afterlife and back again. This collection offers both solace and challenge, constituting a personal and open ritual for how to live on with what we have lost.

Full Product Details

9781837380367

Table of Contents

Reviews

“These immensely moving poems offer a tender, speculative reimagining of the last moments of a life alongside a wholly original account of grief. Amid tragedy, there is also light and humour, and this is when you know you’re in the care of a writer who can tell the truth.” —Anna Metcalfe, author of Chrysalis  ""This astonishing collection of tender elegies is alive and unflinching. Allen's poems are acts of devotion: intimate and erudite, intricate and self-questioning. They reveal how words both fail and sustain us in the aftermath of loss, as we try to grasp 'how / no resource of love / could keep you'."" —Laura Theis, author of Introduction to Cloud Care ""As much a love poem as it is a cry of grief, read this book when you want to be held, but don't know how. Here is a companion, to hold your questions' hand."" —Brian Sonia-Wallace, Poet Laureate of West Hollywood ""Profoundly holy and utterly sacred – this collection reads as an honouring and humanising portrait of one who is no longer here. The opening sequence honestly left me breathless."" —Andrés N. Ordorica, author of Holy Boys

Author Information

Arthur Allen (b. 1994) is an award-winning poet and translator from Cheshire. He first studied Literature at the University of East Anglia, before undertaking an MSt at Oxford. Allen holds a PhD from the University of Edinburgh, where he focussed on grief and semiotics, funded by a College Research Award. He is the author of Twenty Twenty: Treatments for Cut Flowers (Erbacce Press, 2021) which charts the loss of his grandmother during the Covid pandemic, and The Nurseryman (Kernpunkt Press, 2019), an ecological parable about an Elizabethan gardener sailing into the arctic, as well as the chapbook Here Birds Are (Green Bottle Press, 2017), written after the sudden death of his father. Allen's work has been longlisted for the National Poetry Competition and appeared in many publications including Ambit, Fence, New Scottish Writing, Poetry Salzburg, and Swedish Book Review. He is the sole English translator of Maria Wine, forgotten doyenne of Swedish literary modernism. Allen works as a bookseller in an independent bookshop in Leith.

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