A unique epistolary poetry collection and a collaborative feat of rare acumen, Flowers Won’t Grow contemplates mundanity and gratitude with a mix of polite curiosity and tender contempt. The lettered, prose-ish poems of Sandhu and Fowler speak to a luminous private public exchange, and the writeable unspeakables of a long London summer. These are playful, complex poems, of a city, of soap and fizzy water, of a search for commonality in quiet, of paper birds and hardened workers.
BUY Flowers won’t grow (£4.99 + £2.20 P & P)
Flowers Won’t Grow
SJ Fowler & Karenjit Sandhu
Published June 2021
ISBN 978-1-912960-70-5
A5 Size
40 printed pages
Colour
Cimera Series #5
SLB0183
Print run of 200
Price – £4.99
BUY Flowers won’t grow (£4.99 + £2.20 P & P)
‘Exchanges, transfers and transferrals of intimacy and stark urgency – a
work of posed questions, thumbed noses and drawn blood’.
Eley Williams
‘This is a nurse’s attention on a knife edge. A pin-prick of address, a poem
that says “let’s get out of here” to and about itself. Everything is external,
but you can’t get outside, even if you don’t what to know what’s inside. It’s
a hostile take over of mundane objects and day-to-day experience in a
language that asks us to settle for fruit syrup but reaches beyond to the
universe’
Prudence Bussey-Chamberlain
Karenjit Sandhu is a poet and artist. Her debut poetry collection young girls! is forthcoming with the 87 Press (2021). Karenjit’s poems appear in Judith: Women Making Visual Poetry (Timglaset Editions, 2021), Writing Utopia (Hesterglock Press, 2020) and Nemeses (HVTN Press, 2019). Her work has also appeared in Magma in collaboration with Ryan Ormonde (2020), as well as online at Digital Poetics (87 Press, 2020), Junction Box (2020) and DATABLEED (2019). Her performance work has led to collaborations with the Sir Denis Mahon Foundation, the Institute of Contemporary Arts, Flat Time House and Camden People’s Theatre (London), Arnolfini (Bristol) and Galerie Eric Dupont (Paris). Karenjit is one of the judges of the 2021 Streetcake Writing Prize.
@k_ren_sandhu
SJ Fowler is a writer, poet and artist who lives in London. His writing has explored subjects as diverse as prescription drugs, films, fight sports, museums, prisons and animals and his work has been commissioned by Tate Modern, BBC Radio 3, Somerset House, Tate Britain, London Sinfonietta, Southbank Centre, National Centre for Writing, National Poetry Library, Science Museum and Liverpool Biennial amongst others. He’s been translated into 27 languages and produced collaborations with over 150 artists. He has pioneered the fields of performance literature, literary curation, visual, photo and fifilm poetry, collaborative poetry and Neuropoetics. ‘Flowers won’t grow’ is his 44th publication and the 17th to be collaborative.
www.stevenjfowler.com