No Products in the Cart
Crowd Work is the venturous debut by writer Sam Furlong. With candour, its poems detail experiences of a body’s living, materialities it inhabits and shares with bodies and other species. Also, the qualities of pain, and the complexities and contradictions of intimacy. From densely sculpted sonnets to capacious prose forms and ekphrasis, Furlong’s uses of image and tonal variation interweave voyeurism with masochisms and transfiguration. Devotional gestures are amplified from the private to many-voiced conversations, expressly in the sequence ‘Crowd Work’, an unflinching interrogation of the performative side of identity in stand-up’s public setting.
Radically amatory, this debut performs a body’s wanton poetries. Re-making forms, it renders explicit the means by which ‘Through breaking, we are made’.
“The text you write must prove to me that it desires me. This proof exists: it is writing.” — Roland Barthes
"Crowd Work elicits an expansive and extraordinary cartography of the body, ‘rendered finally legible’. Here is Barthes’s jouissance, stripped bare to the bone. Furlong’s writing hurts, and is hurt. It takes your delicate face in its hands, presses it seductively against both sides of pain. It tells you where to look. What you see might save you, or break you. It cannot but change you." — Nidhi Zak/Aria Eipe
Sam Furlong’s writing has been published in Banshee, Poetry Ireland Review, Propel, and elsewhere. They hold an MA in Poetry from the Seamus Heaney Centre, where they were awarded the Ireland Chair of Poetry Student Award. In 2023, they were selected for Poetry Ireland’s Introductions Series by Tara Bergin. They are the Poetry Editor of Frustrated Writers’ Group, and live in Dublin, where they work in customer service. This is their first book of poetry.
Published by Macha Press
Softcover
64 pages
210 x 210 mm
ISBN 9781068769917
