Published 2014. Paperback, 8.5x5.5ins, 116pp.
ISBN 978-1-84861-356-0 [Download a PDF sampler from this title here.]

In Rampant Inertia Alan Halsey, identified by Tony Lopez as a ‘normally secret and invisible language spy’, is found going about his familiar business, dismantling the rhetoric of Austerity while tracking scientific and other uncertainties, rereading Burton in the light of the Arab Spring, miming Our Mutual Friend , transcribing a racehorse’s gossip, mapping the bricked-up public toilets of Sheffield, tapping Lewis and Clark’s conversation in the Lost Trail Pass or fitfully failing to translate Aretino’s erotica. Is ‘Baa baa black sheep’ a political poem? He thinks so. Rampant Inertia completes a trilogy of books, following Term as in Aftermath (2009) and Even if only out of (2011) although it may be the third in a tetralogy. Selections from Halsey's earlier work appeared in Five Years Out (Galloping Dog 1989), Wittgenstein's Devil (Stride 2000), Marginalien (Five Seasons 2005) and Not Everything Remotely (Salt 2006).

'A ludic sensibility combined with a nuanced sense of literary history, an easy-in-its-skin bookishness without idolatry, what Halsey himself calls the work of a "logoclast" – to break the too-serious word, to twit the dogmatic. Pound's adage regarding "direct treatment of the 'thing' whether subjective or objective" keeps imposing itself itself on my thinking about Halsey's work, its carefully appointed assemblings and alignings. Done with humility and empathy for the grand range of human foibles.' —John Latta, Isola di Rifiuti

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