The Guide to Being Bear-Aware by SJ Fowler

This collection brings my work back to the more formally literary, engaging with the 20th century European traditions that brought me into writing poetry. The poems mark a re-engagement with narrative, a first-person subject, though fluid and ironised, and explore ideas surrounding contemporary political and moral factionalism, and its often infantile, hypocritical character, and the place this has in a wider notion of humans as arrogant animals divorced from our history, planet, consciousness and fellow animal beings. The presence of Mayakovsky, Char and Cendrars sit beneath the work as a whole. - SJ Fowler

Published by Shearsman in March 2017