Instant-flex 718 by Heather Phillipson
Issuing from the body-mind's grisly interwedge, Heather Phillipson's poems are a protest against well-stitched seams, an off-loading of intellectual baggage, a shout from the deep-ish channels of fear. The much anticipated debut collection from a writer of substantial note and reputation, Instant-flex 718 is an operatics of reactivation. Splicing the leftovers of culture with spurious monologues discharged from an arrhythmic right ventricle or a mouth filled with half-chewed peanuts, the poems unpick and destabilise. The poet is a plasterer, entering the spits and drips with urgency. Previously published in the Faber New Poets series, and an internationally exhibiting artist, Phillipson has an impertinence and dynamism incomparably her own. Her poems observe the ordinary world stagger.