Kirjahaku

Caleb Parkin’s debut poetry collection, This Fruiting Body, plunges us into octopus raves and Sega Megadrive oceans, in the company of Saab hermit crabs and ASDA pride gnomes. It’s a playful invitation to a queer ecopoetics that permeates our bodies and speech, our gardens, homes, and city suburbs. It reintroduces us to a Nature we’ve dragged up until it’s unrecognisable.Parkin’s perceptive poetry sparks with neon visuals, engaged in the joyful, urgent, imagining of alternative realities and new futures. How might we relate queerly and dearly to our environment and its shared conundrums? These adventurous poems delight in human and nonhuman intimacies, teem with life, ponder bug sex and put masculinities under the microscope. This Fruiting Body roves our grandiloquent planet, embracing our kinships with matter, culture, creatures and drag-mother Earth herself.

The Coin focuses Caleb Parkin's poetics upon his matriarchal line, cancer in the family, class, place, and other themes with moments of lyrical intensity and clarity. This is a book that undertakes explorations of identity, mortality, the grand/mother/son relationship, and more. These are poems about life, death, and the nature of being in which humour, irony, and surprise are always at the edge of the page.

Caleb Parkin’s dark and mischievous second poetry collection Mingle stirs up the toxicities between landscapes, ecosystems and bodies, in poems bubbling over with hyper-wealth and haunted by tarnished ideals. Through creatures, compounds and chemicals, the poems probe what makes up our world's matter, and how we use it for good or ill. From gold to hydrocarbons, radioactive gardening to viral memes, the resulting mixture is a potent poetic cocktail…Here, intimate connections and grand narratives are unsettled; we are implicated in prickly histories and weird futures and the natural world reminds us of its unruliness – as well as our own. Reflections warp in noxious ponds and voices distort and echo in uncanny landscapes. At times hyperreal and surreal, adventurous and technicolour, Mingle fizzes with the possibilities of queered language and altered states of poetic form.

Dette frugtlegeme af den britiske øko- og queer­digter Caleb Parkin tilbyder et fantasifuldt nyt blik på menneske-verden-forholdet, der inklu­derer Moder Jord som drag, blæksprutte-raves og insektsex. Et blik, der holder vores kroppe, sprog, haver og hjem i én og samme kritiske vision. Den spørger: Hvad er poesiens ansvar midt i den økologiske krise? Samtidig er værket fuld af forestillingskraft og utopi i sin sammenstilling af dels det menne­skelige liv og det lige så vitale ikke-menneskelige mylder af kriblende, groende, lugtende og audi­tive livsformer. Nok er naturen blevet en fjernere slægtning i menneskets tidsalder, men her gives en chance for at reetablere den tabte intimitet – og skabe en ligevægt i forholdet mellem det opfattede selv og alt det andet. Caleb Parkin (F. 1983) er en britisk digter, perfor­mer, underviser og filmskaber. Han debuterede i 2021 med digt-pamfletten Wasted Rainbow, samme år som hans første digtsamling, This Fruiting Body, udkom. Den foreligger nu i dansk oversættelse for første gang. To digtsamlinger mere er udgivet senere, The Coin (2022) og Mingle (2024). Med en stærk aktivistisk stemme skriver Parkin i krydsfeltet mellem queer-studier og økokritik med fokus på klima, kropslighed og fedtbjerge i kloakkerne. Dette frugtlegeme præsenterer et nyt blik for en menneskeforandret og nær ukende­lig natur og spørger, hvordan vi igen kan forholde os til vores miljø og de fælles udfordringer. Parkin har udgivet digte i The Poetry Review, The Rialto, Magma, Tall Lighthouse og The Guardian. Han har desuden en kandidatgrad i kreativ skriv­ning med terapeutisk formål og er i øjeblikket til­knyttet biodiversitetsprojektet RENEW på Exeter Universitet som ph.d.-kandidat.