Interior

'Indelible and deeply resonant, Linda Black’s Interior demonstrates a poet at the peak of their powers. This collection constitutes a wondrous neo-Cartesian studio evoking an ars poetica that emphasizes language as both trace and palimpsest. Here, Black explores the intersections of writing, desire and creativity in marvellously fragmented and Frankensteinian ways. In haunting poems, the poet-artist is resur-rected as defamiliarizing and uncanny: ’I rest / my hand outside / myself & draw’. Interior gives priority to improvisation and bricolage, and a questioning semiotics, as it lightly and powerfully sketches the body’s relationship to the world. Black employs compelling dualisms to engage with both the breakdown and articulacy of an utterly contemporary language fully attuned to the ineffable: ’In my heart my two loves merge. This is all I can tell you.’'-Cassandra AthertonComments on Then'’Time is of the effervescence’, the opening poem of Then, reads like a surreal poetic credo with its oblique imperatives: ’Tolerate the unknown, the intimation’. It reminds me of Kenneth Koch’s credo ’Fresh Air’ and his insistence that we should ’glance inside a bottle of sparkling pop’. Like Koch, Black also celebrates the ’new poem of the twentieth century’, now made fit for the twenty-first. Then is a wow.' -Frances Presley, Stride'I simply love this book and could quote from it endlessly. Split into nine sections it’s playful yet serious and seriously playful at the same time. These are poems which sing and suggest, slip from idea to idea, confuse your thought processes yet delight the eye and the brain with an abundance of energy, skill and sheer brilliance. There is rhyme and assonance in abundance, all the traditional tricks of the trade yet done in such a way as not to overstate the case and even when this is the case to do it with such bravado and gusto that the reader is helplessly in thrall.' -Steve Spence, Tears in the Fence'Then is a collection which speaks to the past, present, and future... Then is multi-faceted in its pictorial, tightly constructed, and lyrical manipulations of language. Black’s writing asks its reader not to overthink or attempt to untangle the tricksy language it engages with, but rather to immerse oneself in words and ’Browse for/the time being’. Then offers honest insights into the joyful and traumatic moments of life, emphasising the emotional depth, creativity, and skilfulness of Black’s writing.' -Eilidh Henderson, Dundee University Review of the Arts