Books published by Knives Forks and Spoons

Confessions of a Cyclist is utter inspiration from the film Night Mail, where the opening scene is John Grierson reading W. H. Auden's ground-breaking poem. It is experimental journey-poetics, and may also have family resemblance to Jack Kerouac's On the Road, Hunter S. Thompson's Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, and even Derek Jarman's film Blue. A cyclist lends its hands AND FEET to a great deal of intimacy but no connection, pedaling, which in turn, animates. A cyclist is passive, romancing the world through seducing scenes, without the commitment. Getting lost in time, but within the time-frame given for the daily commuter's route. Mine: 40 minutes one way, and 40 minutes back. A cycle is a repetition of a cycle. The scene never wholly changes but changes constantly. Confessions of a Cyclist takes a journalistic approach through poetics, over-hyping observations, dubbing people's conversations, reporting on regular people seen, for instance, the man in the turban who feeds the pigeons every Saturday morning. In places, the work is biographical, in others, memoir, in others, freak-outs, and in some you can see repeated words become chants when cycling at certain speeds: NOW-AND-A-GAIN-MY-HEN-IT'S-A-NEW-GEN-ER-A-TION.

is poetry a fast business? what happens after ghezi park? how many times will bakunin celebrate his 200th birthday? will our zombi find or work out its ideal recipe for human brains? will any of the letters be answered? what is that face really up to? why? & who set it up to it? how do you eat breakfast? you do eat breakfast, right? & that constant question - will the government ever resign?

Mötley Crüe's fourth studio album, Girls, Girls, Girls, was released on my tenth birthday in 1987. It reached number 2 in the US Billboard 200 Chart that year and sold over 4 million copies in the US, and 60,000 in the UK. In it, the band, notorious by that time for their drink-and-drug-fuelled rock n'roll lifestyle, included songs about their drug and stripper-loving lifestyle.This work seeks to restructure the Girls, Girls, Girls album, not to reveal its inherent misogyny - that should be apparent by listening to the lyrics - but to make something of them.As a girl child who would grow up to be a Girl in the Mötley Crüe sense of the word, I received their messaging about what a girl was - a passive sexual object to be desired and abused - along with a raft of variously textured misogyny in TV advertising, film, other music, magazines, print media and the attitudes and assumptions of the adults around me. I took in the Girls, Girls, Girls album as a model of what being a Girl was, in my little town in the west country, far away from the Sunset Strip.I was wrong to do so, of course, but what did I know? I loved metal bands, and thought they were lewd and wild and marvellous. But despite its title, Girls, Girls, Girls was never meant for me: the songs on it, and on most albums in the genre produced and made by men, were made for a male, heterosexual audience. Perhaps no-one - the producers, the marketers, the band themselves - ever thought about their teenage girl fans, unless it was to decide which ones in the crowd they wanted to sleep with at a concert. It was, therefore, a very good thing that the Riot Grrrl movement came along in the 90s, to liberate us girls from male, white, corporate oppression (Sonic Youth, Kool Thing, 1990).Mötley Crüe were by no means alone in perpetuating misogynist attitudes towards women in the 80s and 90s, and on an individual level, it could be said that they were mostly concerned with getting high and having as much sex as humanly possible - and were not actively pursuing personal misogynist agendas (though, some responsibility does of course have to rest on their shoulders).More, they were a hugely successful band making ideological content encouraged by the patriarchal structures that contracted them to do so - the commercial music industry, which, like all capitalist, commercial cultural production industries, aims to uphold and regulate the social norms in which it operates, thereby ensuring continued investment in its business.Girls, Girls, Girls absolutely typifies the apotheosis of misogyny in a variety of ways. First, it looks at women as objects rather than converses with them in a meaningful way. Second, it considers women only as lovers for heterosexual men. Third, it depicts unrealistic, patriarchally-approved female bodies. Fourth, it alludes to sex with underage girls, which is rape. Fifth, in songs like You're All I Need, desire for women is tied up closely with violence towards them, something I explore against the current narrative of the 'incel' movement.To make the poems in this collection I have used a few different approaches, namely cutup with other sources to provide commentary and comment on the original song lyrics, breaking down the songs to component words and rewriting them, and finding recurrent themes, such as that of geographical locations, and using those words as repeating sets to re-render the original meaning. I have also reflected on lyrics as containing overused clichés, and looked at other clichéd and genred language.

This is a sequence of what I retrospectively regard as 'countersonnets', and they are composed from overheard and gathered material. They derive their shape from the floorplan of the Hergest Unit in Bangor, Gwynedd. The Hergest Unit consists of 3 octagonal buildings that are named after the poets Taliesin, Cynan and Aneurin. A number of my friends have been temporarily housed at this department of Ysbyty Gwynedd Hospital over the years.The Red Book of Hergest, which provides much of the material for this book, is a Middle Welsh text scribed by Hywel Fychan and others in the fourteenth century. It contains seminal Welsh works of literature, including 'The Mabinogion' and the poetry of 'Y Cynfeirdd' and 'Y Gogynferidd'.

Taking only the sonnets Wyatt 'translated' from Petrarch, but adding a few of his own, Robert Sheppard merges the historical Wyatt with his hysterical contemporary analogue, a reluctant civil servant of a corrupt administration. His world fluxes between Henrician terror, administered by Cromwell, and something like our own reality. These sonnets are from a larger grouping called The English Strain.

Situationist poetry

"Ruth Stacey's How to Wear Grunge eschews nostalgia and the self-fulfilling mythology of rock's nearly-famous excesses for a fierce, feminist holler back into the feedback of another place and time, in all its bleached and sticky-carpeted illusions and almost-glory. Between truth or dare narratives that toy with the tension of hard facts - "Too gloomy, tell me about the prettiness again. / No. Tell me the worst thing" - these poems are wild and wise, and faultlessly written. There is a beating rock' n' roll heart of riot-grrl rebellion in every line. Stacey is a fearless and utterly compelling writer, whose candid, courageous poetry takes on the prevailing narrative and places women at the very epicentre." - Jane Commane "In How to Wear Grunge, Ruth Stacey has achieved a bittersweet examination of brutal youth and violent love, with expert attention to the timing of acceptance, obsession and revelation. There's almost a contact-high to these poems, an intoxication that has been carefully crafted to provide relief from the horrors of the past and of each other, creating a deceptively fragile romance of a sub-culture that encouraged the dirt and distortion of the fragmented self. However, once we have questioned the lives of the damaged, haunted souls in this cool as hell collection, what burns through is strength and survival, wounds that gush with the language of dark joy, the sweet stink of dope and incense, a promise (to past, present and future selves) tightly rolled into a joint so full of flavour it will leave your mouth watering. How to Wear Grunge is ultimately a kaleidoscopic questionnaire. There are no right or wrong answers. In the end, we all dance to something. We make noise, we hurt each other and, sometimes, we forgive." - Bobby Parker

James Russell, an Emeritus Professor of Psychology at Cambridge, has been studying psychology for 50 years. In this autobiographical book he reflects on where psychology fails (and succeeds).

Intimately moving over and returning to a valley and fields to the south of Newton-le-Willows, Lancashire, Red Bank raises and interleaves versions of history and experience, amongst them that of a teenager in a school for young offenders in the late 1960s and the battle of Winwick Pass, 19 August 1648. Red bank stands in a nexus of vision: between the costly, oblivious masquerades of Charles 1 and his execution, between the psychedelia of the Beatles and the desire by generations of teachers to help the children in their care, amongst them Mary Bell. The music of the three sections is initiated by memories of 'Penny Lane', 'Get Back' and 'Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds' respectively, and the poem's progress as dream-like as the coincidence of the Beatles' last rooftop concert with the simultaneous laying of flowers by crowds on the site of the Stuart king's execution.