An event to celebrate the recent launches of books by Elizabeth-Jane Burnett (Penned in the Margins), Tom Jeffreys (Influx Press), and Camilla Nelson (Knives Forks and Spoons Press).
From the train line to the footpath, motorway, canal, urban pond, open sea: Burnett, Jeffreys and Nelson will discuss different recent approaches to (“nature”) writing, travel, poetry, landscape, and ways of being in the world and moving through it.
Elizabeth-Jane Burnett will read from and discuss Swims, a long-form poem published in 2017 by Penned in the Margins. The book begins and ends in Devon, moving across the waterways of England and Wales: from urban pond to open sea. The poet swims among fishermen on Grasmere, reimagines the body as bottle cap in the Channel, and clambers down the bank of the river Ouse with words scrawled on her swimsuit.
Tom Jeffreys will discuss ‘Signal Failure: London to Birmingham, HS2 on foot’, a work of non-fiction published by Influx Press in 2017. From a rapidly changing London, through interminable suburbia, and out into the English countryside, Jeffreys goes wild camping in Perivale, flees murderous horses in Oxfordshire, and gets lost in a landfill site in Buckinghamshire. The book is a story of shortcomings – of the author’s own and of humanity’s most urgent failures.
Camilla Nelson, who is chairing the event, will also read from Apples & Other Languages, a collection of poetry published in 2017 by Knives Forks and Spoons Press. Nelson’s poetry treats writing as an environmental practice: her poems have been described as works that “soar through her landscape – half flying, half flapping in the wind...”
About the speakers:
Elizabeth-Jane Burnett is a poet and academic with a focus on innovative poetics. Her most recent book, ‘Swims’ (Penned in the Margins, 2017), is a lyrical celebration of wild swimming. Burnett also curates ecopoetics exhibitions and is Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing at Newman University in Birmingham.
Tom Jeffreys is a writer and editor who contributes regularly to Apollo, Frieze, and Monocle. His first book, ‘Signal Failure: London to Birmingham, HS2 on foot’ was published in 2017 by Influx Press. Tom is also editor of The Learned Pig, an online magazine with four areas of interest: art, thinking, nature, writing.
Camilla Nelson is a British language artist. Her work explores intersections between human and other-than human organisms through page-based poetry, installation and performance. Camilla is founding editor of Singing Apple Press, a small independent press that produces hand-crafted, limited edition poem-prints, books and other objects.
V3 100 Lower Marsh, SE1 7AB London, United Kingdom