Whip-hot & Grippy

by Heather Phillipson

Whip-hot & Grippy is a collection of possibilities in a state of emergency. In the first part, a series of long-form and sequenced poems augment various states of being divided/plural in attempts to activate unauthorised directions. Disrupted tangents are punctuated by recurring muzak, advertising-speak, sex scenes, terrorism, broadcast media, consumption-anxiety, protest, human-animal relations and cosmic departures. Throughout, informed discontent and humour act as drivers of dissent, mining conceptual complexity and testing poetry’s combustible potential. The book culminates in ‘more flinching’, a multi-part poem first published and freely distributed in an exhibition. Merging the news of a military dog, shot in service, with the death of a pet dog, it collapses images with bodies and politics with intimacies, enacting failed attempts to navigate practical and emotional entanglements. Whip-Hot & Grippy is Heather Phillipson's second collection, following her highly praised debut, Instant-flex 718, published in 2013. As well as being an award-winning poet, she is an internally renowned artist whose sculpture, ‘The End’, was installed on Trafalgar Square’s Fourth Plinth in 2020.

Genres: Poetry

128 pages, Paperback

First published April 25, 2019

Reviews

[Jennifer · Rating 4 out of 5]

I thought initially this was one that would just make a whistling noise as it went over my head and left me cold. Heather Phillipson works as an artist and you could certainly imagine her words installed with video and other visual media in a gallery. Even here words are arranged in a variety of ways on the page and there are images too.

But I jumped on for the ride and jumped off at the end blinking and wondering "What was that?" in a good way. Some of the lines are astonishing, the contemporary references coming thick and fast and dizzying, the visceral being, well visceral in impact (although there is a tad too much vomiting) It's a book for the dog lover meshing the love of a dog, love from a dog, grief for a dog and a military dog... it moved this reader to smiles and to thump in the heart sadness. Successful poetry moves us and by that metric, Whip-Hot and Grippy was a success for me.