Hotel Amour

<p><strong>“This is simply extraordinary writing, laced with wonder and devastation…” Joanna Klink</strong></p><p>A sequel to her T. S. Eliot Prize shortlisted <em>Erato</em>, <strong>Deryn Rees-Jones</strong>’ remarkable new collection sees her returning to ongoing preoccupations: the complexities of memory and memorialisation, desire and the body, and poetry’s place in a hostile world.</p><p>The book begins with a woman checking into Hôtel Amour, a space both real and imagined, in the heart of Paris. This is a hallucinatory city where surreal symbols loom large: the hotel’s pink neon sign, elephants, doubles, and lost pairings. A bloody heart lies in the street, books concertina into song, and everywhere is the ever-present noise of birds.</p><p>Playful, and moving by turn, <em>Hôtel Amour</em> experiments with fragmented narrative and poetic form, creating a breathing space for a multilayered and powerful meditation on illness, love and time. Hôtel Amour’s fierce and formidable exploration of ‘the now’ and its many ghostly literary pasts, is the work of a poet at the height of her powers as she asks us to listen, and explore our human capacity for transformation and for hope.</p>