Angela Gardner - The Told World

Paperback, 8.5x5.5ins, 84pp.

ISBN 978-1-84861-371-3 [Download sample PDF from this book here.]

Sometimes it is difficult to distinguish losses from gains. The world we live in constantly changes and so how to make sense of it all? What is the relationship between mind and body when the mind’s world is built from the body’s sensations? What will we be when we return from war, from love? Who will we be in the post-human machine world? How will genetic manipulation change us and our representation of ourselves? The Told World contemplates some themes of ‘The Pastoral’ in a contemporary world and explores the stories that can be told from that chiaroscuro.

“With this fine collection Gardner’s work achieves what one poem describes as ‘beauty itself / taut against the half-life rendering.’ Human experience is the shadow cast by these poems, and not the other way around. ‘A wholeness ghost-licked or absent / gets caught in the machinery,’ Gardner observes, and yet these fearlessly unhaunted poems serve to backlight the ghosts that gather at their edges, that any reader brings to bear upon these stanzas’ precise attentions.” —G.C. Waldrep

“Angela Gardner’s exhilarating work pushes the materiality of language with all its smart, nimble coherencies and her inimitable wit against the immateriality of ideas almost always grasping ‘the telling space of it’. With immense, high-wire verve, Gardner flits between living in the inconsequential, dismissive social world and the lofty dreaming of an artist’s envisioning truth. Her syntax mirrors these splits and severs and then is healed with passionate and lyrical engagement.” —Cherry Smyth

“‘…how nearly we are human’ these poems cry out, surveying the uncanny zones (just as Walter Benjamin’s backwards-facing angel does) of progress and atrophy. Here is a poet employed in a mesmerizing ‘artful riot of pleasures’ across droll blunt landscape; The Told World brings these ‘otherwheres’ to life. Zoomorphic, totemic, primordial, perhaps vatic, Gardner’s is a language to reanimate the logic of our deathly netherworlds.” —Dan Disney

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