Everything That Can Happen E-Book

• Herausgeber: The Emma Press
• Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
• Serie: The Emma Press Poetry Anthologies
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 57

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019

Beschreibung

Everything That Can Happen contains many kinds of future: an android fills out a passport form; the local cricket pitch is lost underwater; frozen limbs thaw from cryogenic sleep; robotic shoes allow for highspeed parenting. The poems in this anthology explore time, language, changing landscapes, future selves, uncertainty, catastrophe and civilisation. Whether imagining a distant, apocalyptic future or the moment we live in, nudged slightly beyond what we know, the poems ask what we can do to prepare ourselves for a future that edges a little closer every day.

Leseprobe

EVERYTHINGTHATCANHAPPENPOEMSABOUTTHEFUTURE

Note from the illustrator: For this book I decided to create series of scenes of the old town centre of my hometown of Bracknell, once a vision of the future when it was designated a New Town after WW2.

THEEMMAPRESS

First published in the UK in 2019 by the Emma Press Ltd

Poems copyright © individual copyright holders 2019Selection copyright © Suzannah Evans and Tom Sastry 2019

Illustrations copyright © Emma Dai’an Wright 2019

All rights reserved.

The right of Suzannah Evans and Tom Sastry to be identified as the editors of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

ISBN 978-1-910139-52-3

A CIP catalogue record of this book is available from the British Library.

Printed and bound in Great Britain by TJ International, Padstow.

The Emma Press

theemmapress.com

[email protected]

Jewellery Quarter, Birmingham, UK

EDITORS’ FOREWORD

How do contemporary poets imagine the future? Your answer is between these covers. There are many kinds of future in here, and versions of our world that are recognisable in differing degrees. Poets look forward in different ways: some anxiously, some with hope, and some with resignation.

Some look into a distant, apocalyptic future; some take the moment we live in and nudge it very slightly beyond what we know; all explore their feelings about the present. This book is full of energy, prophecy, humour, despair, passion, anger, fear and love. It is sometimes indecent. It looks unflinchingly into the darkness, at the brutality of human nature and the fatbergs of our shadow selves.

This book is profoundly humanistic. It understands how high the stakes are, whether the future in question is that of a single person or the whole of humanity. It is deeply concerned with the question what is it to be human? It has some surprising answers.

What this book does not offer is carefree optimism. In these times where both the planet and Western politics appear to be at melting point, that is not a surprise. What is surprising is how little the book touches on current affairs. We mentioned the Trump Presidency in the blogs we wrote to accompany the call for submissions. Our poets did not. There is no Brexit in this book.

Instead, the prophecies in this book are varied; there are robots and floods. There is cryogenic thawing, strange music and occasionally a glint of hope for the future.

Perhaps what the book reflects is not so much our immediate fears as the fact that the foreseeable future is, almost by definition, a frightening place. For one thing, it is going to kill you. Even more annoyingly, it favours those already on the rise as we project current trends forward. It is the place where our most urgent fears are played out. When we anticipate the future, it is natural to take the aspects of our own time which are changing fastest – the ones we understand least and find most alienating – and amplify them.

This book looks forward with trepidation, not cynicism; with a profound sense of human fragility and an intense engagement with life. It is full of mischief and full of beauty. It contains a spirit which, fortified with a little optimism could transform the world.

But because the future is unknowable, let us stick with what we know. This is a collection of poems which had the power to take us somewhere unfamiliar and make us believe in it. We hope you enjoy them as much as we have.

SUZANNAHEVANSANDTOMSASTRY

NOVEMBER 2018

CONTENTS

SECTIONONE: THEFUTUREISJUSTAPOINTINTIME

counting, by Pamela Johnson

Mechanical Time is not the Creator’s, by Karin Molde

Womb, by Kerry Priest

Future You, by Shelley Roche-Jacques

Signs of the Times, by Tim Kiely

Once, by Luke Palmer

To his crazy future eyes, looking coyly at the future, by Rishi Dastidar

Divination, by Charlotte Eichler

Feed the Fatberg! by Jo Young

SECTIONTWO: JUSTAROUNDTHECORNER

Daughter, by Craig Barker

An unborn child wonders if it’s worth it, by Anita Pati

Gaza, by Robert Hamberger

Worlds, by Shruti Chauhan

Flood Defences, by Ilse Pedler

Reef, by Joe Carrick-Varty

The End of the End of the Pier Show, by Emma Simon

Breaking the Curfew with Dangerous Friends, by Rosie Garland

In Case, by Jessica Mookherje

Phone Call, by Carole Bromley

Everything that can happen, by Shauna Robertson

Hello. I’ve been waiting a long time to give you this. by Amy Acre

SECTIONTHREEE: ADIFFERENTKINDOFLIFE

Death Magazine, by Matthew Haigh

The Great Wall (2016), by Nina Mingya Powles

Canoply, by Jo Young

Everything will be permitted, nothing will be desired, by Laura Ring

An Android Decides To Apply For A Passport, by Sue Burge

Letter from the silent city, by Annie Fisher

Post-diluvial interview, by Jane Wilkinson

Dad, by Peter Twose

Thaw, by Charley Reay

Algorithmically Designed Electronic Universal Score, by Rishi Dastidar

Space Walk – Postcard Home, by Alexandra Citron

My Robot, by Matthew Haigh

Man is a liyre, by Chloe Murphy

SECTIONFOUR: ATTHEENDOFTHINGS

At the end of the road, by Susannah Hart

Good milk for our children, by Rishi Dastidar

The Sky Has Fallen, by Frank Dullaghan

Silence and pause, by Susannah Hart

The last giant, by Susannah Hart

The Tiger, by Sharon Black

The keeper of bones, by Alice Merry

Mate choice, by Jessica Mookherjee

On the Last Day, by Marion Tracy

Acknowledgements

About the editors

About the poets

About the Emma Press

THEFUTUREISJUSTAPOINTINTIME

To sit, conscious of occupying an arbitrary present, looking into the past or the future – this is a deviant act. It subverts our animal nature.

It creates a radical fiction: that the past and future are places we can imagine if not visit.

These places were never equals. The past has precedence. It has reproachful ancestors and heroes of improbable dimensions. It has a form.

The future has none of these. There is something disreputable about it.

PAMELAJOHNSON

counting

every ten seconds a wave breaks

swirls up the shore

forty babies are born

twenty into poverty, twenty people die

a hummingbird’s wings beat seven hundred times

lightning strikes the ground in a thousand places

ten thousand barrels of oil burn while the sun

flings five million tons of matter into space

and the universe expands by ninety-two miles

the next wave comes, drenching my boots

KARINMOLDE

Mechanical Time is not the Creator’s

after Franz Radziwill

A bird with broken mechanics clanks its cuck-oo.

An hour glass rolls across the highway like tumbleweed.