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
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 haunting and polyphonic work exploring the intersection of grief, place, memory and imagination.
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.
London in the dark end-times of the late noughties; escaped war criminals and their hired thugs scavenge like hyenas amid the city's smut and glitter, the system appears in nonchalant free-fall and words drop cheaply as grimy metropolitan rain. With this dystopian backdrop, where language is spun, redacted and renditioned, McCabe and Reed's gritty riposte performs an angry and elegant resistance. A poetry chain-letter that seeks to interrogate the city and to map the capital on foot.
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