Radio Nostalgia

Synopsis

Radio Nostalgia examines the borders of war, social exile, and manufactured liberty expressed through corporate media. The poet's world is mediated through news anchors, oracles and heralds, where simulated events are historicised through narrative and consumed as product. Chris Emery's auditory imagination is lurid and comically compelling, with imagery the sets the reader reeling with the terrifying beauty and sinister power of it all.

"As palliative as a corpse in a junkyard, Radio Nostalgia doesn't relax you so much as it opens a way into wakefulness. With a stunning lexicon, short phrases stuffed with grit, petrol and spleen, Chris Emery orchestrates a complex, resistant music into one to three-beat lines as our 'countdown to armaments'." —Forrest Gander

Praise for this Book

‘As palliative as a corpse in a junkyard, … Radio Nostalgia doesn’t relax you so much as it opens a way into wakefulness. With a stunning lexicon, short phrases stuffed with grit, petrol and spleen, Chris Emery orchestrates a complex, resistant music into one to three-beat lines as our ‘countdown to armaments’. He refuses to look away from the tableau vivant of degradation. “It is (as promised) all here for you now”, he writes, a twenty-first century so wounded and blout that only the language that crawls over it shimmers with its implicit hope for transformation and redemption.’ —Forrest Gander

Reviews of this Book

‘… has complex roots. The poems owe much to cinema … a distinctive sonic resonance…word music which sets his work apart. In these poems Emery has discovered a language which articulates the complex and nightmarish ramifications of the war on terror…’ —Philip Terry

‘The stark nature of the world and the taut lives of the characters which people his particular wasteland … thrives on the binding device of this tight diction… springs the rhythm of the entire language and renders it foreign … a rather breathless feel to it … musical and expansive.’ —Nigel McLoughlin

‘… strong, gritty and very appealing…a plainness of diction and a wry humour … witty, gracious and entertaining …presented with real dignity and compassion.’ —Robert Nisbet

‘Radio Nostalgia is cover-to-cover quality, also dense and disparate, so the first several poems throw the reader into a dark room. Until you recover your Night Vision, these poems will escape you, until you see the ashen, moonlit strains that shoot through the book. The martial and the political come gradually into focus, poem after poem, and at their most keen the poems indict a particular mayor, governor, political candidates in general, a British Parliament and Prime Minister.’ —Ezekiel Black

‘Totally fantastic, though be warned that the humour is jet black and the subject matter even darker. Cleaner and crisper than Dr Mephisto, less scatalogical, more accessible, some poems are truly gorgeous and even disturbing, the whole book moves between modes of address and different registers, it had breadth and ambition, and pulls it off.’ —Paul Dent