Nine Arches Press
Adventures in poetry
Hedonism
Chris McCabe
ISBN: 9781916760264
eISBN: 9781916760271
Price: £11.99
Publication date: 4th September 2025
Format: Paperback / eBook
Territories: World
Extent: 72pp
DCF: Poetry Collections
Cover artwork: Chris McCabe
Join a carnival of characters including Bez from Happy Mondays, Jorge Louis Borges, and a medieval pilgrim on a journey to buy a PlayStation, in McCabe’s sixth and most daring collection. Part-written in Scouse dialect and invented languages, Hedonism offsets the comic with the elegiac in a spectral and polyphonic work exploring the intersection of grief, place, memory and imagination.
This is a book where haunted pasts and futures collide; in a post-Brexit landscape, through cities both imagined and real, McCabe’s poems merge through timeslips and ghostly encounters, all the time electrified by the great connector of language at its most radical and unruly. These incandescent poems surge and resist expectation and formula – declaring “can it be, after all, that hedonism is the only activism?”
Praise for Hedonism
‘If you love Chris McCabe's earlier poems as I do, you will find the voice maturing to the state of brilliance, delivering us a masterpiece! This new book is one of the best hoards of poems I have read in years! Nothing makes me happier than having poems sting me and leave me stunned!’ - CAConrad
‘Chris McCabe's poetic landscape is haunted -- Magus, doppelgänger, crypto miners, translators, Telemachus -- and from this dizzying range of hauntings and voices comes a restless and resonant interrogation of what it means to be strangely alive, now, with all its Surrealism, impossibilities and emotive failures: 'Told we were investing our power to unlock rare jewels, we were but clerks'. And yet the poet here is a 'greenfinch', sewing everything together with a rare and dialectal music.’ - Richard Scott
Chris McCabe’s work spans artforms and genres including poetry, fiction, non-fiction, drama and visual art. His work has been shortlisted for the Ted Hughes Award and the Republic of Consciousness Prize. His most recent poetry collection, The Triumph of Cancer is a Poetry Book Society Recommendation and he is the editor of several anthologies including Poems from the Edge of Extinction: An Anthology of Poetry in Endangered Languages and The New Concrete: Visual Poetry in the 21st Century (with Victoria Bean).His novels are Dedalus and Mud. He is working on an epic series of psychogeographical prose books documenting the lost poets buried in London's Victorian cemeteries, the latest of which is Buried Garden which was chosen as a White Review Book of the Year in 2022.
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The Nine Arches Press blog features poems from many of our poets, as well as interviews and articles.
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