Minimum Security Prison Dentistry S J Fowler The fourth full-length collection from London-based S J Fowler is uncompromised and uncompromising in its exploration of prison language and prison violence.  |
"If you think poetry is some sedate pursuit carried out in an ivory tower then you obviously ain't read Steven Fowler. He makes Bukowski look like Billy Childish and Billy Childish look like William MacGonagall!" Stewart Home
"Imagine a Boys Own Paper landscape with True Crime architecture. Laurence Harvey dodges from building to country trying to evade CCTV whose sound footage runs through Babelfish. The smells are Jack London, the light is Genet and the memories are Edgar Lee Masters. Equally in words is Steven Johannes Fowler's Minimum Security Prison Dentistry: elegant, coldly funny, at times emotional, textured with occasional accidental/intentional solecisms; but getting the work done. Nowadays most pages labelled "poetry" are unreadable and uninteresting: these give hope. Anyone who can name-check Joe Arpaio and Jacky le Mat, and reference the cover-texture of an Anselm Hollo book from the sixties rides my particular range." Tom Raworth
“This could be the worst book you will read this year, the discussion is violence, but really it’s a punch from a cup cake, using narrative and expressionist syntax. His celebration of where is, has a clipped disgust.” Allen Fisher
“Punchy, lyrical, and incandescently inventive, by turns surreal and disarmingly direct, these kaleidoscopic poems enter the house of prison language via the back door and take no hostages. If Captain Beefheart had done St. Quentin, the result might have sounded something like this.” Philip Terry |
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