The Recycling av Joey Connolly

Joey Connolly's second book of poems focuses on dissolution and aftermath. It roams across forms and history, grieves for a relationship that broke down, and it is haunted by climate anxiety. The Recycling asks if the specific occasions of this particular book - circling round heartbreak, the solaces of art and the natural world - only deflect the abiding terror of a dying planet in what he calls 'humankind's millenarian agriculture of want'.Riffing on the work of other writers' attempts, optimistic and in the end futile, to reach out to the other - human or not - Connolly's technically audacious poems churn traditional poetics into a heap of repurposed pages, rusted fastenings, glittering fragments. Connolly's dense, thinky, often darkly funny poems are, as Will Harris writes, 'a serious attempt to write philosophy as poetry [...] without losing sensuality's boom boom.'