The Recycling

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.'