Description
About Will Harris
Will Harris is a London-based writer. His debut poetry book RENDANG (2020) was a Poetry Book Society Choice, shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize and won the Forward Prize for Best First Collection. He co-edited the Spring 2020 issue of The Poetry Review with Mary Jean Chan. He has collaborated with the artist Aisha Farr, and helps facilitate the Southbank New Poets Collective with Vanessa Kisuule. He co-translated Habib Tengour’s Consolatio with Delaina Haslam in 2022. His second book of poems, Brother Poem, will be published by Granta in the UK and by Wesleyan in the US in March 2023.
About Brother Poem
A speculative-poetic work from the Forward Prize-winning, T.S. Eliot shortlisted author of RENDANG.
At the heart of Brother Poem is a sequence addressed to a fictional brother. Through these fragments, Will Harris attempts to reckon with the past while mourning what never existed.
The text moves, cloud-like, through states of consciousness, beings and geographies, to create a moving portrait of contemporary anxieties around language and the need to communicate. With pronominal shifts, broken dialogisms, and obsessive feedback loops, it reflects on the fictions we tell ourselves, and in our attempts to live up to the demands of others. From a dimension uncannily like our own, intuited through signs, whispers, and glitches, Brother Poem is shadowed by the loss of what can’t be seen.
Telling stories of bizarre familial reckonings and difficult relationships, about love and living with others, it is a deeply sensitive coming-of-age poetics.
