Our featured publication for March and April is Green Apple Red by James McDermott, published by Broken Sleep Books.
James McDermott’s Green Apple Red is a dazzling pamphlet which maps the speaker’s growth from shamed ‘unnatural’ adolescent into queer adult proud of their nature. These majestic poems look towards a queerness of nature encouraging the inosculation of the reader and McDermott’s written word.
“Clear yet complex poems which lovingly interrogate queer desire to find shame, intimacy and protest in equal measure – unearthing, ultimately, a resonant wisdom in the Norfolk landscape and natural world” Richard Scott
“Green Apple Red revels in entanglements and inosculations, queering the language of nature: ‘bears’ who ‘are worshipped in sub-cultures’; an apple-eater consuming ‘only Cox’s’. In sensuous poems of belonging and longing, James McDermott carves out space for queer bodies in landscapes. These poems invite us to be shameless and public, ‘out in the open’ amongst our fellow creatures: unique, ‘fizzing with want’ like a bee, but ‘just another animal’ too. At once ‘cricket ball small’ with ‘Shame’s Stone’, but gutsy with the ‘second brain’ of the intestines, there’s abundant clarity, humour and vulnerability here, for wandering queers (and non-queers) everywhere” Caleb Parkin
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The Weight
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Shame’s Stone
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My Queer Mind Goes For A Walk
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How Queer I Live On Norfolk Coast
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James’s poetry books include the spoken word collection Manatomy (Burning Eye Books; long-listed for Polari’s First Book Prize 2021) and the pamphlets Erased (Polari Press) and Green Apple Red (Broken Sleep Books). James’s second collection Wild Life will be published by Nine Arches Press in June 2023. James’s poems have been widely
published in magazines and journals including Poetry Wales, The Cardiff Review, Ink Sweat & Tears, Butcher’s Dog and Fourteen Poems. James’s plays published by Samuel French include Rubber Ring (Pleasance Islington/UK Tour) and Time and Tide (Park Theatre/UK Tour; Offie nominated for Best New Play 2020; long-listed for the Bruntwood,
Papatango and Verity Bargate Playwriting Prizes). James is also one of the writers on EastEnders, an Arvon Writing tutor and Lecturer in Scriptwriting at The University of East Anglia. Twitter – jamesliammcd, Instagram – jamesmcdermott1993
Copies of Green Apple Red are available to purchase from James’s website.
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