Superpositions

(Beir Bua Press, 2021)

Superpositions in now out of print. A PDF version of the book is available to view and download below.

‘Michael Sutton offers a poetics of the clause superimposed with dangerous modifiers and a rich man’s portmanteaus. These poems skip through scenes, permeate partially actualised realities, and tease the poor lyric with interlaced collage, visual, and found text. The essence of poetry lingers in these remarkable fragments. And a voice emerges through and across the accumulation of formula, form, and foreign objects.’ — Gregory Betts

‘Poetics as lit matches for a world on fire. Michael Sutton’s latest work is terrifyingly real, with its keen sense of imminence and knack for revealing behavioural strangeness and human (ir-)responsibility. Interestingly, humour weaves through the general seriousness/activism of these poems but, as Pound demanded, it too is willing to fight like tragedy. Cue the ‘glassgrime’ moaning of Hirst’s cow or Prince Phillip in dialogue with Titan, lampooned, vaudevillian, odd bedfellows finding one another via the ‘vice of vapidity’. Ultimately, as Sutton is aware, through these brilliantly eavesdropped and intimate snapshots of living, or attempting to live, the greater tragedy is bound up with our gesture as a humanity, our collective presence in the world. The language here is both physical and innovative. ‘I want to carry you into my mouth’ writes Sutton and into that dark void we go.’ — James Byrne