Tottering State #6: Samuels, Hykel Mears, Nelson at East Bristol Books
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A event on Friday 7th February. The event starts at 19:00.


Tottering State #6: Lisa Samuels, Andrew Hykel Mears, and Camilla Nelson.

Tottering State: Poetry for Unsteady Times presents the best in experimental & small-press work from the UK and beyond. For this sixth installment, we welcome three poets interested in the webs & branches stretching between language and ecology. Visiting us from the USA via New Zealand, Lisa Samuels will be joined by two local poets from Bristol and Somerset, Andrew Hykel Mears and Camilla Nelson.

On *LIvestream* by Lisa Samuels:

Lisa Samuels’ *Livestream* is digital capture thrown elsewhere, body fluids that charge being, and planetary liquid flows. The poems erupt, stagger, hold, and reflect as they evoke events and responses distributed through bodies and ethical borders. How language conjures us, and how we sense (with) it, is *Livestream*’s constant ecology.

On *Breach* by Lisa Samuels:

Starting with the dead, with Li Wenliang, who was the first to raise the Covid alarm, Lisa Samuels’ *Breach* pitches and surges in deflections, hungers, and political feeling through pandemic-as-ordinary-life. Breach is a song of lockdown: its tragedies, absurdities, non sequitur linguistic hilarities, and nightmarish lexical distortions. Writer and translator Lily Robert-Foley describes *Breach* as “'The first work of poetry I have read that has helped me think-feel COVID; the way it is changing the relationship between inside and out, and the personal-political metaphysics of materialism, as body, as power, and as language. A vaccine against the solitude of screen heritage, confinement, and fear, Lisa Samuels’s Breach is also a meditation on the material of contagion. In terrifyingly precise helicoid strands of words hinging and unhinging from the order of grammar, Samuels unravels in poetic nucleotides the warp and weft of our different transnational pathogens.'

On *Open Ribs are a Church Full of Sky* by Andrew Hykel Mears:

These poems in move from family gatherings to hospital corridors, from blind veterans' gardens to walk-in freezers, examining how memory and loss shape our understanding of both personal and collective history. Capturing contradictions of contemporary English life—where algorithms measure human engagement, ancient traditions persist in digital spaces, and orange centipedes become ‘polished stone’—Mears explores how personal histories intersect with both cultural moments and ecological processes. Through observations of how bodies interface with their environments—eggs crying into themselves, ribs opening to sky—these poems create a portrait of life that is both deeply specific and universally resonant, poems that pull at the permeable boundaries between human and more-than-human worlds.

On *EPIC* by Camilla Nelson:

Camilla Nelson's *EPIC* writes back to the traditions of walking in Romantic and Modernist literature. Particularly influenced by James Joyce’s Ulysses and Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway, EPIC maps the world as it appears immediately, through and with the senses, emotions, cultural and personal histories of a walking body-mind as it moves out of the domestic, into its rural environment, and back again; sewing loops through the land with your feet.

On *Apples and Other Languages* by Camilla Nelson:

Nelson’s latest collection represents a maturing of an eco-poetics which treats writing as environmental practice. In ‘root-like speech’ and ‘lingual follicles’ this is a meticulous poetry of enquiry into experience, whilst making language itself an experience. Full of rich encounters in a ‘natural’ world in which we ‘use our words for trees’ in a ‘muddy stanza’, Nelson asks ‘in what language tree names rain’. Showing allegiances to the work of Harriet Tarlo, Maggie O’Sullivan and Geraldine Monk, one might find a quiet, central image at the heart of this collection in the mysterious figure of ‘graphis […] scripta’ – the ‘secret writing’ lichen.
– Scott Thurston

These poems are lightful.

Tree – chrysalis – human – pheasant – ivy – imprint “voice with voice” in auditory embodied enquirings of song.

A wit(h)ness of (apple – sky – human – rainfall) forms letters and musics; a co-allowing of selves, offering a language of betweenness ‘on the lichenous page’.

“stir this miracle into waking”.
– Maggie O’Sullivan

Bios:

Lisa Samuels experiments with poetry, art, and relational theory in transnational life. Her most recent books are The Long White Cloud of Unknowing (Chax 2019), Breach (Boiler House 2021), and Livestream (Shearsman 2023), and punctum books will soon publish a selection of her essays as Imagining what we don't know: creative theory and critical bodies. Lisa is Professor of English at the University of Auckland in New Zealand.

Andrew Hykel Mears is a poet based in Bristol. His most recent book Opened Ribs are a Church Full of Sky is published by Bread & Roses Press, 2024. He’s the managing editor of Ambient Receiver: A Journal of Creative Ecologies, focussed on sound works and literature that write with the More-Than-Human.

Camilla Nelson is a British language artist, small press publisher of Singing Apple Press, creative programmer and freelance academic. She has a PhD in Performance Writing from Falmouth University/Dartington College of Arts (2012). Her work explores the materiality of language in page-based poetry, soundwork, installation and performance.

Entry requirements: no age restrictions

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