The Last Tape

In this haunting debut collection, Alex Niven explores a poetic hinterland that is also a psychological and cultural wilderness. Adopting a style grounded in the radical minimalism of northern English modernism and romanticism, Niven writes poems constructed out of traditional forms cut up and reassembled to produce an abrupt lyric realism ideally suited to the political subject matter of his verse. These are poems of anger, mourning, and finally, extraordinary optimism, announcing the arrival of a historically lucid new bearing in twenty-first-century British poetry.

HIDDEN TRACK

I couldn’t work out whether
you were part of the future
or a beautiful aftershock.

Blind spots where the sun snuck.
Your skin was syncopated, weightless.
We crossed every finish line,
woke immaculately new.