The Parts of the Body that Stink
My 11th poetry collection published by Hesterglock Press (March 2024).
128 x 218 mm / 101 pages
Available in a special limited edition hardback run of 50, signed, to celebrate it's launch https://stevenjfowler.bigcartel.com/product/theparts
Soon to be available in paperback here https://hesterglock.net/SJ-Fowler-Stink
“The thing that stinks the most … is you! Or this book. Who cares? That’s not what this is about at all. You stink, I stink, everything worthwhile stinks. Smell it while you can. This is an eccentric poetry book by most standards, divided into five chapters, each a long poem. Nose, pits, feet, anas, genitae. All about how we smell and what that might worry in us. For example, let’s not get obsessed with what we’ll smell of in the grave! After all, you smell right now. Let’s just read, and for one day, not give ourselves a scrubbing.”
London Launch : March 23rd 2024 at Rich Mix
Launched with a poetry perfumier performance, much to the horror and delight of many watching noses, video below, and thanks to those who helped me, Rushika Wick, Katerina Koulouri, Mischa Foster Poole and Michael O’ Mahony.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2V1VqlpBumo
The event theenemiesproject.com/londonstink featured 10 performances in all, by many brilliant poets and writers, and many on the theme of stink, smell, scent, aroma. Worth a peek.
Kingston launch of The Parts of the Body that Stink March 27, 2024
An entertaining, and weird even for me, night of performances down in Kingston as part of Writers Kingston. Some new student collaborations and lots of hesterglock authors performing too. Someone pretended to be a horse. Someone measured paper. Someone put cake down a glove. It was quite rangey and a bit light headed.
I launched my 11th poetry collection to friends and many of my students, and used a fan to blow camembert air into the audience. Good to read from the final of the 5 long poems that make up the book. All the event stuff here https://www.writerskingston.com/theparts/
Surrealism feature on Shuddasar February 1, 2024
David Spittle has put together an incredible special issue of Shuddasar celebrating neo-surrealism, contemporary surrealism, and I’m very happy to be featured in it alongside poets like Aase Berg, Julia Rose Lewis, Tom Jenks, Stephen Sunderland, James Byrne, Geraldine, Monk, James Knight, Aaron Kent, Vik Shirley and more. It’s massive.
https://shuddhashar.com/magazine/issue-37-surrealist-poetry/
And my stuff, excerpts from different sections of my new book The Parts of the Body that Stink
unescaping the way others can
with flush
you live to breed bacteria
once a day, for food and air
to find at last
the smell
that really is you
what is funny
on the nose
is beyond waits new
around one understanding
what is the smell of the trap?
how old are you, someone asks?
you look around, see no mouths at all
you sniff the air
when you are hot, you’re bothered
you sigh sigh
your hands curl into a ball like a monkeys paw
to think of how monkey’s smell
the great apes and their reeking fur
all over the jungle
children don’t like you
and you don’t know them
it’s lovely to talk to other people’s cats
cats who smell very little but you don’t be fooled
they know when you’re around inside their little pink triangle noses
and they tell
they tell others and they come
and you hide
and you run
and then you get worse even
and then you cry
and that is why
the cats smell the blood on your back
dried and flaking
and that is the only reason they like you
From an article by David Spittle on The Parts of the Body That Stink : March 2024
“Extending in a rabid evolution from the momentum of The Great Apes (2022) and into the great stench, Fowler is reimagining the long poem – not as ‘epic’ or in the vainglorious folly of intertextual expanse but in the mischievous flesh and stain of an all too human mess. Using the dare of blunt accident, chance misspellings and grammatical mishap, the poem reveals the performed intelligence of certain poetic traditions (their postured erudition in the airless intellect of self-congratulation) in its, ironically far smarter, force of idiocy. There is a primal and somatic wisdom in the enactment of honest mess. Through and alongside the brute play of unmaking the taste and smell of language, Fowler invokes a truth more sensitive than any crafted position or honed perspective. Poetry with the dignity of refusal, a turning away from any flag-planting absolutes, and away from the hypocritical vantage point of any codified message; it exists to dirty the soapbox of advertised persuasion, to grab for something more vital.
Parts of the Body that Stink is satire expressed in physicality, bursting, in the necessarily strange and splintered wit of language, like a spreading bruise. Not a commentary but a fundamental and rudimentary smear of body-talk. No pirouettes of rehearsed persona or didactic pantomimes of familiar critique – but something more gleefully liberating, something that hits you like a smell, a building pressure that draws us close in the messy digestion of being. For all its churning provocations, this is a poem that celebrates its chaos and, in doing so, becomes a madly compulsive read. Full of upsetting comedy and barbed with volatility, reading becomes a form of sparring: you try to find out where you sit in the text, where the voices are in the text, where voice cannot go but bodily residue continues – that inarticulate eloquence of happening; how the body buckles and, getting up, transcribes its aching gristle. New mess from the swallowed and chewed apart – a turbulent passage, a wording of gut in the real and corporeal gore of poetry and speech.”