THE LIVES OF Z Format: PB - PAPERBACK

Featuring the poem 'Autoemotive Funerals I-IV' (The Forward Book of Poetry 2026)

Olivia McCannon’s latest collection is shot through with questions. How ecological is English? How do you read an unreadable world, or a transforming planet?

The Lives of Z is an inventory of poem-artefacts gleaned from the spoilheaps of a speculative future. Each ‘find’ emerges with the randomness of any archaeological discovery, in that moment when its significance hangs in the air. Except that here, life is growing out of the data.

In this space of provocation and encounter, the reader is invited to “play Z’s game” and crash-test different ways of being in language. What will I have been? Who or what owns the ‘collective possessive’? How many life forms can inhabit the same pronoun?

Z, the creative principle of life – multitudinous, networked and irreverent – is running the experiment, in an unrepentantly ‘bad science’ mode.

Salvaged from what can’t be thrown away, these poems meet uncertainty with creativity, searching for the freedom and the words to reclaim human and earthly connections.

Olivia McCannon is a writer and translator. Born on Merseyside, she has lived in Paris, London and elsewhere. Her first poetry collection, Exactly My Own Length (Carcanet), won the Fenton Aldeburgh Prize and was shortlisted for the Seamus Heaney Centre Prize. Her translation of Balzac’s Le Père Goriot (Penguin Classics) was selected as one of Boyd Tonkin’s 100 Best Novels in Translation. Recent work has appeared in Dark Mountain, PN Review, MPT and Shearsman magazine. The Lives of Z emerged from AHRC-funded doctoral research at Newcastle University.