Instant-flex 718 (Paperback)

Heather Phillipson is an internationally exhibiting artist and award-winning poet. Instant-flex 718 is her much anticipated first book-length collection. She is already a widely published and anthologised poet. Her Faber New Poets pamphlet appeared in 2009, and her text Not an Essay from Penned in the Margins in 2012. She received substantial publicity as one of the first four writers featured in the Faber New Poets launch, taking part in a national tour supported by extensive TV, radio and newspaper coverage. Heather Phillipson’s poems are a protest against well-stitched seams, an off-loading of intellectual baggage, a shout from the deepish channels of fear. With its cover designed by the artist-poet herself, Instant-flex 718 is an operatics of reactivation. Phillipson has an impertinence and dynamism incomparably her own. Her poems observe the ordinary world stagger.

Heather Phillipson has published four volumes of poetry, including two full-length collections with Bloodaxe: Instant-flex 718 (2013), which was shortlisted for the 2013 Fenton Aldeburgh First Collection Prize and the Michael Murphy Memorial Prize, and Whip-hot & Grippy (2019). She received an Eric Gregory Award in 2008, a Faber New Poets Award in 2009, was named a Next Generation Poet in 2014, and received Poetry magazine’s Friends of Literature Prize in 2016. She is also an award-winning artist, working across video, sculpture, environments, drawing, music and web projects. Solo projects include the Fourth Plinth in Trafalgar Square in 2020, recent exhibitions at Whitechapel Gallery London, Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt, Frieze Projects New York and BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, and major commissions for the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago and Art on the Underground’s flagship site at Gloucester Road station, London. She received the Film London Jarman Award 2016 and the European Short Film Award selection from the International Film Festival Rotterdam in 2018.