A note on : Sticker Poems! available for pre-order

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I am so excited for this. I have had so much joy making this book, the next in my visual poetry series, and over a year in development. It has been such a pleasure to work with Dan Power of Trickhouse Press on the project, which is 99 full colour, full bleed, complex collagic weird poems made of actual stickers and digi-text. Launched on June 10th, more soon on that, but available for pre-order now https://www.trickhousepress.com/product/-pre-order-sticker-poems-by-sj-fowler/6?cs=true&cst=custom

Forget everything you thought you knew about stickers and everything you might have suspected about poems. From animals to Mexican wrestlers, football players to medieval knights, zombie apocalypse to motivational mantras, Garbage Pail kids to dinosaurs, Sticker Poems is no less than a snapshot of human cognition, narrated by Fowler’s idiosyncratic poetics.

This book offers a bold new take on what poetry means, a playful shock treatment for arthritic literary convention, and the kind of crystalline insight which is usually reserved for the deranged. It contains 99 original and striking sticker poems, as well as essays by SJ Fowler and David Spittle.

“Screw your courage to the sticking place! SJ Fowler has invented a new poetic form, and traced out all its kinks and convolutions in one deliriously weird book. Let your nail grow out a bit to really get under the corners of his language and prise them off the page and you’ll be rewarded. I found at least one of these adhesive little poems at the back of my knee after a particularly hard reading session and now it’s stuck. What is there in life but adhesion?” - Colin Herd

Published : Beir Bua special feature - 8 art-poems from 8 books

A very energised online journal from Ireland, Beir Bua, edited by Michelle Moloney King, has generously featured my art-poetry as their special focus in their second issue. It collates one example, one art-poem, from eight of my books. It essentially draws upon what I’ve been working on, in exploring visual poetry and the handmade, and the poem brut movement, since the summer of 2017 and prior. It’s satisfying to see it represented in this way, and the issue has some really fine poets in there too, from Gregory Betts to Susan Connolly and many others new to me. Worth checking out https://beirbuajournal.files.wordpress.com/2021/02/issue-2-15.pdf

The works are taken from my books Come and See the Songs of Strange Days (Broken Sleep), due next month, then Crayon Poems (Penteract Press 2020), Aletta Ocean Alphabet Empire (Hesterglock Press 2018), The Selected Scribbling and Scrawling of SJ Fowler (2020), I fear my best work behind me (Strange Press 2017), Sticker Poems (due out later in 2021 with Trickhouse Press), Unfinished Memmoirs of a Hypcrit (Hesterglock Press 2019) and finally Bastard Poems (due out later in 2021 with Steel Incisors)

Also featured in the issue are short reviews of my books Crayon Poems, Unfinished Memmoirs of a Hypocrit and Aletta Ocean Alphabet Empire, kindly penned by the editor, who also reviews my friend and collaborator Christodoulos Makris, as well as introing the issue. https://beirbuajournal.wordpress.com/journal/issue-2/