Books by Sam Riviere

An extraordinary debut novel from an award-winning poet, about poets, plagiarism, love, technology, feuds and affairs, cancellation and revenge, and how writing really does alter reality

Welcome to After Fame - an ambitious and resonant engagement with the epigrams of the Roman poet Martial, which completes the loose trilogy of Sam Riviere's process-derived works. It was Martial who first used the term 'plagiarism' in its modern sense as a kind of literary theft.

The 72 poems in Kim Kardashian's Marriage mark out equally sharpened lines of public and private engagement. Kim Kardashian's 2011 marriage lasted for 72 days, and was seen by some as illustrative of celebrity life as a performance, as spectacle. Whatever the truth of this (and Kardashian's own statements refute it), Sam Riviere has used the furor as a point of ignition, deploying terms from Kardashian's make-up regimen to explore surfaces and self-consciousness, presentation and obfuscation. His pursuit is toward a form of zero-privacy akin, perhaps, to Kardashian's own life, that eschews a dependence upon confessional modes of writing to explore what kind of meaning lies in impersonal methods of creation. The poems have been produced by harvesting and manipulating the results of search engines to create a poetry of part-collage, part-improvisation. The effect is as refractive as it is reflective, and disturbs the slant on biography through a bricolage of recycled and cross-referenced language, until we are left with a pixellation of the first person.