Comic Timing

by Holly Pester

The long-awaited first collection of poems from an influential young poet.

Comic Timing, Holly Pester's extraordinary debut collection of poems, chronicles the experience of living and working as a radical and resistant act. These poems shunt a reader between the political and personal via unique, fragmentary and illusory turns of phrase. Holly tackles marginal bodies, landlords, bog butter, desire, domestic and civic spaces in an unique and illusory voice. She chronicles the prevailing mood of our times, mining radical and anarchic histories to offer a collection of political resistance with both absurdity and seriousness.

These poems interrogate and poke fun at the expectations of people in a commodified culture with a wry humour. Combining a beautifully performed naivety with a profound intellect, this collection is a hugely original approach to a number of pressing issues. Worker's rights, feminisms, reproductive rights and marginalised bodies and their positions are all through in this startling and innovative voice.

Genres: Poetry

96 pages, Paperback

First published February 4, 2021

Reviews

[S P · Rating 4 out of 5]

Have Discovered that My Mother Is Not My Real Mother but the Drunk Woman Banging on the Wall Is

Dinner ruined, I left, embarrassed. Have also found staged pictures of Fake Mother whom I thought until now to be True Mother, holding plastic twins in a birthing pool that is definitely the Jacuzzi in my rich but also imaginary husband’s house. She is wearing sunglasses and smiling. I send it to brother with ‘suspicious?’ noted on back. Eventually find flickering footage of young Fake Mother’s training for inauthentic motherhood at the North Laboratory. Girls are strapped to upright tables. Baby alligators dipped in pasta sauce are gaffer taped around their necks. The alligators snap and swing in the hammocks under the girls’ chins in order to condition them to care work. Led Zeppelin soundtrack.

(p27)

[Darran Mclaughlin · Rating 3 out of 5]

I thought this was a really good collection of poetry. I haven't read much poetry for some time. To be honest I think it's been years since I last read a collection. But I enjoyed this and think it is well worth reading. Pester writes in a wide variety of styles and forms. The poems feel quite raw, exploring and confronting issues like poverty, lack of security, the female body, anxiety, oppression in the workplace and as a tenant, living with flatmates and being at the mercy of landlords. Reading this has reminded me that poetry can touch places that novels or short stories can't reach.

[Alex Ankarr · Rating 1 out of 5]

omg. absolute performative honkingly clueless yucko phoney shite. bleeuk no ta.

[Caspar "moved to storygraph" Bryant]

this was really neat, a challenging collection that's happy to get messy, kristeva-style. Actually on that note go read sophie robinson's poem here - https://poems.poetrysociety.org.uk/po... - - -sorry holly for the interruption

I'm really curious about the bog-turn somewhere halfway thru this, I think she's got a lot of levity there & I'm glad somebody's taken the necessary post-heaney plunge. if we call it that.
I LOVE How and Why to Make Porridge, it gets me just right

hey martyr hey suckling keep
for all the time spent softening
you're full
forthcoming you're funk
I said I'm heavy sauce myth-bulked
a cup of roux
I am cope pod definitely a shape
lying on birth soap
hoping for mercy or myrtle
for a truant to turn out the future
fully preserved and
unworrying cheese in the rot cupboard

[Raeraeg · Rating 5 out of 5]

witty, erudite, cleverly crafted poetry. loved it.

[Tony · Rating 3 out of 5]

Every so often in my poetry reading I come across a collection of poetry that is hard work. Not because it is bad, but because it takes effort to untangle. When reading this I felt like a stone being skimmed across a lake. Occasionally, the stone would feel like it was flying, but then it would sting the water. Then lifted again. But eventually it would sink beneath waves.

This is Holly Pester's debut collection and she isn't taking any prisoners. The blurb describes her 'unique demotic'. I had to look up demotic. It means, as far as I understand, colloquial speech. Pester's language is certainly her own and the subjects of the poems - from my perspective - is survival in a dull and difficult world. A world which challenges us constantly. Either spiritually or physically. Particularly women. And women's experience - of their bodies, of poverty, of politics, of everything - are at the centre of this collection.

One of the poems in the collection that affected me the most. A poem that would make this collection worth reading almost on its own is "The Work and It's Record." It's a protest poem. Or I think it is. A cry from the heart about the constant battles that women are having to fight, with the emphasis on abortion.

If I was a professional reviewer of poetry I would, of course, have dug into Holly Pester's interviews and used that to help me build on the weak foundations of my understanding. But that always feels like cheating to me. Like reading other people's reviews so that you can work out how you feel about something. I think you've got to go purely with you own feelings. Because, at its core, what is a review if it isn't personal?

Did I enjoy reading this? Yes, I did. Not because it was easy and not because I think it gave itself up to me clearly. I found it hard work. I had to re-read and re-read poems. I still don't know if I 'get it' but I enjoyed the attempt. I will certainly read this again, because I feel it has more for me.

I have written paragraphs above that talk with a certainty I don't feel about what this collection is about. I'm probably entirely wrong. I'm sure if Holly Pester was to read this review she'd think I was an idiot, which may be true.

I also don't want you to think that this is pretentious. It isn't. Pretention, which is a word I hate btw, implies - in England anyway - a certain artsy-fartsy self-regard. That isn't what this collection is doing. It's using language in its own way, but not as some academic exercise. Pester wants to say things her own way and if that isn't what poetry should be about then I don't know what it should be about.

But Holly Pester will probably think everything I've written is nonsense. Thankfully I will never know.

[Juliano · Rating 5 out of 5]

“Imagine how wonderful it is to speak as wreckage. The timing is incredible.” Comic Timing, the debut poetry collection by Holly Pester, offers an exciting, vibrating spread of work, poems that scald and scratch even as they apply their soothing balms. Funny and well-timed, yes, a barrel of laughs, gasps, clicks and affirmative mmms — but it’s also darkly political, with a (mostly) healthy dose of personal insight and self-appraisal, never shying away from what is uncomfortable. Incendiary rebukes against capitalism and the bewilderment of modern life: fast food, ill-advised sex, motherhood (or not), letting and being let, the constant thrum of the abortion, its heft, necessity, consequence, hypocritical opposition. There’s particular excellence in her writing on writing: “Who can read and write in here? / The room will change soon. / This is the monument and tide of a life”, she writes in ‘Thirty-Six’; then, “and now my loneliness is a book of him // but The Writers / The writers are on fire // in residence / and preserved”, in ‘Common Graves, the Body and the Blockade’. Writing is instability (which is not news) but also a means of resisting the structures of a mad imposing world (which may be news). Holly Pester, poetry’s “bad maid to capital’s heart muscle”, is a marvel, realised and so bold.

[Tutankhamun18 · Rating 3 out of 5]

I really loved the poems in the first part of this collection, especially the poem “Comic Timing”, but the poems in the other three parts did not work as well for me. They seemed less polished, less able to walk the line between crystal clear meaning with strange imagery and well captured emotion. Therefore, I would give part one 5 stars. Themes of being a woman, working vs. money vs. basic human needs, desire, agency, rebellion, and expectation (of yourself and from society, going against it and conforming to it).

[Elise Thompson · Rating 3 out of 5]

Whilst I am sure what she writes is beautiful, I would liken this book to eating roast lamb. The meat is tender and scrumptious and you have no regrets about ordering it, but you find yourself chewing on fat about as much as you are swallowing.

A good read and a talented poet but the collection is hard work.

[Stephanie · Rating 3 out of 5]

Some were spectacular; others I really couldn't begin to understand.

[Alice · Rating 4 out of 5]

this was gonna be 3 ⭐️ till she brought out the poem about how much she relates to lucy snow in villette, what amazing content.

[Lauren · Rating 1 out of 5]

Potentially the weirdest poetry collection I've read. I couldn't make sense of it but then again, I don't read much poetry.