Outwith

by David Herd

New British Poets No. 1 // NEW BRITISH POETS is a series of chapbooks edited by Stephen Collis and Amy De Ath that brings new work by British poets to North American readers. OUTWITH presents a series of poems about displacement, about locations where one becomes unlocatable, and the imposition of that most indeterminate and yet ever expanding state the state of exception. Herd is everywhere concerned with the suspension the refugee and detainee is held in a state in which the spatial, temporal, individual and iterative scales are enclosed, made fugitive, unmarked. Thus he is fulfilling that crucial political role of witness, attempting to bring these very structures of exception into the realm of the expressible to mark their absence. Minute, careful, and yet expansively serial, Herd s work ranges far and wide as it circles an absent local.

32 pages, Paperback

Published June 19, 2012

About the author

David Herd is a poet, critic, and teacher. His collections of poetry include All Just (Carcanet 2012), Outwith (Bookthug 2012), and Through (Carcanet 2016), and his recent writings on the politics of human movement have appeared in Los Angeles Review of Books, Parallax and Almost Island. He is Professor of Modern Literature at the University of Kent, has worked with Kent Refugee Help since 2009, and is a coordinator of Refugee Tales.