RING CYCLE Format: Paperback

Poetry. A beautiful, formidably intelligent yet profoundly inviting book, Alex Houen's much-anticipated RING CYCLE brilliantly orchestrates its many motifs across poems that move from the metaphysical to the intimate to the droll sometimes within one poem. Houen is a poet of lavish linguistic sensuality, his poems vibrating with his attunement to fissures within the self, between lovers; salutes to friends; romantic skirmish; the ambient dread of our moment. Houen's brilliantly mash-upping mind encompasses pirated DVDs, Dryden and Alexander McQueen, conceits poetic and contemporary and untimely and unheimlich. A book of enormous range, simultaneously lush and austere, RING CYCLE tracks the perversities of erotic and filial suspension alongside questions of conscience and aesthetics.

Alex Houen is author of the poetry chapbook Rouge States (Oystercatcher, 2014), and co-author (with Geoff Gilbert) of another chapbook, Hold! West (Eyewear, 2016). He is co-editor of the online poetry magazine Blackbox Manifold and teaches modern literature in the Faculty of English, and Pembroke College, University of Cambridge.