FLOWERS WON’T GROW
by Karenjit Sandhu and SJ Fowler
(July 1st 2021) Sampson Low Ltd
https://sampsonlow.co/2021/06/21/flowers-wont-grow-karenjit-sandhu-sj-fowler/
35 pages of poetry printed in a limited edition of 150. £4.99.
From the publisher “A unique epistolary poetry collection and a collaborative feat of rare acumen, Flowers Won’t Grow contemplates mundanity and gratitude with a mix of polite curiosity and tender contempt. The lettered, prose-ish poems of Sandhu and Fowler speak to a luminous private public exchange, and the writeable unspeakables of a long London summer. These are playful, complex poems, of a city, of soap and fizzy water, of a search for commonality in quiet, of paper birds and hardened workers.
“‘Exchanges, transfers and transferrals of intimacy and stark urgency – a work of posed questions, thumbed noses and drawn blood’.
Eley Williams
‘This is a nurse’s attention on a knife edge. A pin-prick of address, a poem that says “let’s get out of here” to and about itself. Everything is external, but you can’t get outside, even if you don’t what to know what’s inside. It’s a hostile take over of mundane objects and day-to-day experience in a language that asks us to settle for fruit syrup but reaches beyond to the universe’
Prudence Bussey-Chamberlain
The book was written across 2019, in what seems now a fever of activity and exchange, for this collaboration and in my work in general, and then revised in 2021 for publication. Karenjit is a really excellent writer and performer and I think the text is really good – playful, ludic, knotty.
It's the third in a series of collaborative pamplets with Sampson Low, following Beastings and Crowfinger, and as ever before, Alban Low has done a remarkable job bringing this to life.
FLOWERS WON’T GROW Launched at the European Poetry Festival 2021
Karenjit and I had two launches, following two performances of the text in late 2019. The first was in Richmond Park and the second in Hoxton Trust Gardens, both as part of the European Poetry Festival. Both performances included an exchange of reading and action between us, with very loose suggestions beforehand, and much completely improvised. For both I did forward rolls and some leaping and running, why I did this is a mystery.
