Brother Poem

A speculative-poetic work from the Forward Prize-winning, T.S. Eliot shortlisted author of RENDANG

4 million years ago, a tiny branch in the multiverse led to the formation of Brother Poem, a book from a dimension uncannily like our own but intuited through signs, whispers, glitches, and echoes, shadowed by the loss of what can’t be seen. Brother Poem tells stories of bizarre familial reckonings and difficult relationships, about love and living with others; it is a shifting portrait of the personas which define us.

At the heart of Brother Poem is a sequence addressed to a fictional brother, an attempt to reckon with the past while mourning what never existed. A text that moves cloud-like through states of consciousness, being, and geographies, it creates a moving portrait of contemporary anxieties around language and the need to communicate.

With its pronominal shifts, broken dialogisms and obsessive feedback loops, Brother Poem is a ludic reflection on the fictions we tell ourselves, and on our attempts to live up to the demands of others. Brother Poem is a deeply sensitive coming-of-age poetics.