The Sun is Open
Will be published approx. on 15. September 2021
Book
Paperback/Softback
126 pages
978-1-908058-92-8 (ISBN)
Description
Winner of the John Pollard Foundation International Poetry Prize
Winner of the Christopher Ewart-Biggs Literary Prize
The Sun is Open sifts through a boxed archive of public and private materials related to the life and death of the author's father, who was murdered by the IRA outside their Belfast home in 1984.
Moving between child and adult voices, past and present, this startlingly innovative debut attempts to decode the fragments left behind and, with them, piece together a history and a life.
'Each page of The Sun Is Open is rich with exquisite and surprising language, pain, and wisdom.' - Maggie Nelson
'The Sun is Open employs a grammar in which everything is significant, from Wendy Houses, to the very hairs of your head, to the poetry of First Aid instructions, to slaters. This is meticulous and painstaking - sometimes pain-making work - making the words fit the columns, be they inches of newsprint or entries in an Account Book, negotiating or nudging the meanings into alternative senses.' - Ciaran Carson
Winner of the Christopher Ewart-Biggs Literary Prize
The Sun is Open sifts through a boxed archive of public and private materials related to the life and death of the author's father, who was murdered by the IRA outside their Belfast home in 1984.
Moving between child and adult voices, past and present, this startlingly innovative debut attempts to decode the fragments left behind and, with them, piece together a history and a life.
'Each page of The Sun Is Open is rich with exquisite and surprising language, pain, and wisdom.' - Maggie Nelson
'The Sun is Open employs a grammar in which everything is significant, from Wendy Houses, to the very hairs of your head, to the poetry of First Aid instructions, to slaters. This is meticulous and painstaking - sometimes pain-making work - making the words fit the columns, be they inches of newsprint or entries in an Account Book, negotiating or nudging the meanings into alternative senses.' - Ciaran Carson
Reviews / Votes
'In this devastating yet immersive book, McConnell skilfully utilises juxtaposition, understatement and negative space to offer us an intimate work of poetic testimony.'Mary Jean Chan, The Guardian * The Guardian *
More details
Language
English
Place of publication
London
United Kingdom
Product notice
Paperback (UK-B)
Dimensions
Height: 216 mm
Width: 139 mm
Thickness: 15 mm
Weight
190 gr
ISBN-13
978-1-908058-92-8 (9781908058928)
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Schweitzer Classification
Person
Gail McConnell is a writer and critic from Belfast. She is the author of two poetry pamphlets: Fothermather and Fourteen. Gail's poems have appeared in Poetry Review, PN Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, Blackbox Manifold and Stand, and she is the recipient of two awards from the Arts Council of Northern Ireland. She is Senior Lecturer in English at Queen's University Belfast and the author of Northern Irish Poetry and Theology (Palgrave, 2014). Gail's writing interests include violence, creatureliness, queerness and the possibilities and politics of language and form.