Lurex

by Denise Riley

A brilliant outing from one of the finest poets currently working in the English language. This is at once a sharply political and deeply personal book which explores just that intersection.

‘Wide-ranging, sometimes anguished, her poems are fascinating and often beautiful, and certainly more than usually thought-provoking’ Guardian

Genres: Poetry

68 pages, Kindle Edition

First published March 3, 2022

About the author

Denise Riley (born 1948) is an English poet and philosopher who began to be published in the 1970s.

Her poetry is remarkable for its paradoxical interrogation of selfhood within the lyric mode. Her critical writings on motherhood, women in history, "identity", and philosophy of language, are recognised as an important contribution to feminism and contemporary philosophy. She was Professor of Literature with Philosophy at the University of East Anglia and is currently A.D. White Professor-at-large at Cornell University. She was formerly Writer in Residence at Tate Gallery London, and has held fellowships at Brown University and at Birkbeck, University of London. Among her poetry publications is Penguin Modern Poets 10, with Douglas Oliver and Iain Sinclair (1996). She lives in London.

Reviews

[Caspar "moved to storygraph" Bryant]

more denise rereads!! This one does indeed sparkle. builds from ssb wonderfully imo & pulls together a kind of neurotic obsession with the disappointments of secularism.
Lurex achieves what seems to be pretty crucial for me these days - - - - in poesie, which is making me feel weird inSide my own body ha ha. ah ha ha ha h

[Juliano · Rating 5 out of 5]

“Dear life, don’t ghost me yet!” Denise Riley’s latest poetry collection, Lurex, is a triumphant successor to Say Something Back, her poems so full of defiant life and the spectre of death. She is attuned to the dark fragility of existence, of being someone’s child, or having one’s own: “Whether they’d come to love its fleshiness or / not, you did force life on dear future corpses.” With striking lyrical skill, incantatory in essence, Riley writes, in the autobiographical sequence ‘1948’: “It made the truest of songs — / it was the truth ablaze, / it was pure wanting, bloodied and radiant. / Holy, holy, sang that pursuit / and holier the infants born of it. / Then unholy the contempt that circled me.”, and, later, says that “This history’s too commonplace to tell. / It is a story which so many own. / How do I get it right, alone? / The point of telling is to crack its spell.” And elsewhere, in her brilliant prose poem ‘I get through’, Riley encapsulates the very palpable, tragic and contradictory core of solitude: “One drawback of loneliness: you can notice yourself too much, carrying this self around between cupped hands like something fragile in need of careful positioning, although you’d not meant to become a thing to yourself, far less a delicate fetish.” Riley’s work continues to strike a chord, poignant, ever-informed by grief, love and time.

[Gerard Woodward · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very varied and wide ranging collection, between what feel like short autobiographical pieces to meditations, prose poems, poems that are arrange vertically so you have to turn the book on its side, little rhymed glimpses of a thought or a thing, playful experiments, a continual engagement with other literary voices, satirical snipes at contemporary literary mores – prize culture, or the way things are delivered – counterbalanced by a pervading sense of loss, time passing and isolation, but above all a distinctive, unique voice, seeing the world in surprising ways.

[Joanna Ward · Rating 4 out of 5]

enjoyed!

[Po Ruby · Rating 3 out of 5]

I struggled to find a way into these, but everytime i did, she knocked me over the head. Obvi she's a genius, my millennial soul just craved more dark n sparkly.

[Emma Reilly · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.75... a real treat!