Description
“This is a crushing debut pamphlet on the surrealism of death and the queerness of loss, in the lineage of Emily Berry and Franz Kafka. ‘You were so sweet / and kind, Mum, but your corpse is a fucking nightmare,’ Wyld’s speaker sighs, or deadpans, or screams. But the beautiful trick of The Butterfly Bush is that, just when these speakers appear to be stuck forever in a weird nightmare, they manage to find some comfort, some interest to get them through – like, sure, you’ve been afflicted with a fast-growing toenail curse, but if you community-organise, you could raise the funds to pay for a dedicated nail-clipping assistant. The Butterfly Bush is a testament to Wyld’s endless curiosity: reader, return that gaze and your attention might just pupate into a butterfly, or a whole bush of them.” Helen Bowell
“Wyld has a unique voice that is simultaneously alarming and seductive. You might think you know where a poem is going, only to be met by a sudden switch that is catnip for the synapses. Wyld weaves a sensuous spell rooted in the materiality of life. They explore complicated sexual dynamics, loss and a queering of ecopoetics which relishes the natural world from spiders to a black leopard. As a visual artist, Wyld paints images as arresting as they are original, while the music of the poems and their gorgeous cadences are testament to Wyld’s hypnotic power as a performer. As well as celebrating strangeness, surreal humour creates space for fresh ideas about experience and survival, injury and bereavement.” Lisa Kelly
“The Butterfly Bush is an expansive, maximalist project with an alluring, permeating strangeness. The turns are constantly surprising, the language delicate and luscious, the images bodily and caustic. These poems interrogate memory and how narrative both supports and supplants it, asks what is left in the spaces around our artistic renderings of self. The recurring image of dirt across these poems becomes a semantic burial plot, a way through elegy that focuses on the soil beneath our feet, the earth departed by the missing subject.” Susannah Dickey
