Our Voices in the Chaos- now Free

In 2018 I was writing poems and putting erasure poems onto Instagram (much the same as today.) A small press called Selcouth Station approached me and asked if I wanted to make a pamphlet around those erasure poems. After a lot of work, the result was a hybrid pamphlet called Our Voices in the Chaos.

I used the blackouts I created as prompts and wove them into my poetry. Often I would use the blackout as the first lines then write underneath, but I also use used them as the last line or a line in the middle. The poems were shaped by the erasures and tended towards surreal and vaguely apocalyptic.

It’s strange reading it back now. The pamphlet was published in October 2019 and builds towards an imagined crisis. Of course, five months later we were in the middle of an actual crisis and it was nothing like the idea. The way I write poems has also changed a lot in the years since I published this pamphlet. I would do things very differently now and would probably get rid of half or more of the poems. This is necessary I think, because if you don’t look back at your old work and cringe a little bit, you haven’t evolved as an artist.

Anyway, Selcouth Station sadly closed down in March of this year. I really appreciate them for taking a chance on a fairly new poet and for publishing my work. They put care, attention and passion into their press and were willing to go along with my hybrid experiment. I’ll always be grateful for what they did.

With the press gone, I’m faced with the dilemma of what to do with this pamphlet as you can no longer buy it. So I’ve decided to put it here for free. You can download it, share it, remix it, do what you want with it. It’s no longer my work, it’s yours. No catches, no newsletter signups (unless you want to of course, go here). Just a free pdf.

Download here (direct download, pdf only)

You are welcome to buy me a coffee but is by no means essential.