Absence
Ali Lewis
Absence, the third title in CHEERIO’s acclaimed poetry series, is a book about nothing. Or nothings: losses, vacua, gaps.
From the desolation at the heat-death of the universe to the impassable distance between two people talking, and from the trust exercise of walking in darkness to experiments on the vacuum, Absence searches for what’s missing and what we never had.
Starting with the problem of how to represent that that isn’t there, and ending with the end of love, Absence takes in the ache for a
vanished god, the permanently delayed doomsday of millenarian cults, and the overflowing life inside our seemingly empty buckets and stomachs.
Ali Lewis’s poems mirror, undermine, reframe and rephrase each other in a voice that feels as precise and scientific as is it playful and warm. Absence is both intricate and ambitious, comic and tragic.
It is a book of restless curiosity and revelation.
Wonderfully off-kilter, this witty, sometimes dark collection depicts the absurd in the everyday, the sudden upsetting of what is considered normal.
PUBLISHED ON: 08/02/24
£11.00
Praise for Absence
‘Lewis unpacks the absurdity of human drama with intellectual curiosity and a muted sense of humour . . . Absence is a miscellaneous debut unafraid of confronting “a no-shape no-thing: the unthinkable / after imagining”.’ – Kit Fan, Guardian
‘I love this. Ali Lewis’s poems have an unparaphrasable quality, as if they’re not read but inhaled, like a clear vapour which leaves you giddy, tranquil and troubled all at once. Read it, you’ll see what I mean.’ – Caroline Bird
‘In these searching, inventive, quick-witted poems, vulnerability is revealed then obscured and the ordinary and everyday becomes transformed.’ – Kim Moore
Praise for Hotel
‘Intimate, ludic and formally adroit’ – Karen McCarthy Woolf
‘An exceptional new talent.’ – Kathryn Maris
‘Rueful, sexy, funny’ – Luke Kennard
About the author
Ali Lewis is a writer and editor. He received an Eric Gregory Award for his pamphlet, Hotel (Verve, 2020), and his poems and short stories have appeared in the London Magazine, the TLS, Poetry Review, and the New Statesman, as well as in Poetry London, where he was Associate Editor.
He frequently collaborates with composers and settings of his work have featured on Radio Three and Radio France Musique.
He holds a PhD from Durham University. Absence is his first book.