Book Launch: Two Twin Pipes Sprout Water
Join us for the launch of Lila Matsumoto's Two Twin Pipes Sprout Water, with readings/performances from Lila and Sam Buchan-Watts, whose collection Path Through Wood was recently published. The launch will be hosted by Prototype editor Jess Chandler, publisher of both collections.
Two Twin Pipes Sprout Water, a Winter 2021 Poetry Book Society Recommendation, brings together five discrete sequences of poems and poem-stories. Moving through different voices and times, landscapes and interiors, Lila Matsumoto’s new collection offers a sense of the world as an observed tableau, inviting the reader to participate in a creation of a strange yet familiar world full of ordinary-extraordinary moments.
‘In her new collection, Lila Matsumoto – already perhaps the funniest experimental poet working on this island today – studies and (em)bosses folly and sincerity as an artist of attitudes.’ - Callie Gardner
‘A real quantum strangeness abounds in Lila Matsumoto’s poems – actual glimpses of the life’s fast-running plurality, all the sprouting impressions and perspectives, in misleadingly tidy sentences that unfold like intricate inventions.’ - Sam Riviere
Sam Buchan-Watts' debut collection Path Through Wood considers the capacity contemporary lyric poetry has to reflect social change. The many ethical dilemmas these poems enact listen in to the noise which society makes to distract itself – from carceral space to questions of asylum, masculinity and the boundaries of aesthetic play. Described by the Guardian as a ‘sceptical, serious, versatile writer’, Buchan-Watts variously inhabits poetic form, exposing the interplay of sound, sense and desire. Returning repeatedly to the figure of a vulnerable boy approaching the thicket of adolescence, these are poems that are listening in when they’re not supposed to, distracted when they should be listening in, and finding secret listeners behind the arras. In this disquieting terrain, we must hold ourselves to account for what we hear and what we make of what we hear.
Both authors will be reading from their collections, both of which will be available to buy, along with a selection of other Prototype titles.
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Staff will be wearing face masks.
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Lila Matsumoto’s publications include the poetry collection Urn & Drum (Shearsman, 2018) and the chapbooks Soft Troika (If a Leaf Falls Press, 2016) and Allegories from my Kitchen (Sad Press, 2015). She teaches poetry and creative-critical writing at the University of Nottingham and plays in the bands Food People and Cloth. Her website is: lilamatsumoto.com
Sam Buchan-Watts is the author of Faber New Poets 15 and co-editor, with Lavinia Singer, of Try To Be Better (Prototype, 2019), a creative-critical engagement with W. S. Graham. He is the recipient of an Eric Gregory Award (2016) and a Northern Writers’ Award for Poetry (2019). In 2018 he undertook a fellowship at the Yale Center for British Art and he is currently a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at Newcastle University.