Fq By Alan Brunton

Life, Love, the Universe -- and Christchurch. Alan Brunton was born in the Garden City and wrote this astonishing sequence of 144 poems while he was Writer in Residence at the University of Canterbury in 1998. Bumper Books is proud to present Fq, in which the poet has a go at everything and nobody is spared. All the big questions are asked and all possible answers interrogated.

Fq is funny, bleak, tender, savage, philosophical, prescient and crazy in the streets it walks looking for a way out, a ticket home, a trip to the other side of the galaxy. Geopolitics rubs shoulders with erotic fantasy, existential vertigo is coefficient with loopy lyrics in the mind of Shoe, aka Roadman, X-Man, Rooster, Roadster, Road Knight and Mr Ess, the last of the salt-free Bards, seeing out his sentence in the south with help from strange substances and local stooges in the course of his covert and comic Op. Meanwhile his unattainable beloved shifts her shape as hyperbolically as he does, incarnating variously as Nadia, BIJOU, Polly Pop and Lola InternationalTM. Fq is a self-generated labyrinth which the poet must thread in order to make it through the Exit intact.

Fq, the last work prepared for publication by Alan Brunton before his death in Amsterdam earlier this year, is a masterpiece of the exilic mode. It confirms his reputation as the most innovative, abundant and far-reaching poet of his time.

164 pp, $35 + postage
Available October 2002 from
BUMPER BOOKS
PO Box 7356
Wellington South
New Zealand
e-mail redmole@actrix.co.nz

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