J R Carpenter

Measures of Weather is about more than just weather. What isn't weather? Weather here is a stand-in, for the elemental, the transitional, the ungovern-able. And what does it mean to measure? To find intersections. To articulate complex subject positions. To use language to make tangible changes in the material world. To call attention to the invisible in all its myriad of forms, from the minuscule to the gigantic. To articulate the inchoate, to give shape to the ineffable, the transient, and the impossible. Carpenter uses language as a medium to grapple with organisational structures and their failings, to think beyond the scale of the human body, to engage with a tangle of vast systems-of air, of glass, of wind, of west."Shifting between scales, from the celestial to the microscopic, J. R. Carpenter's Measures of Weather excites the ear with its deft handling of blazing innovative language and its exhilarating music. This exquisite collection thrives under poetic constraint." -Alycia Pirmohamed"Measures of Weather articulates a new form of poetic working with histori-cal material. This articulation raises questions about how European culture has historically perceived natural phenomenon-how we have constructed imaginative and often erroneous ideas about how nature operates, and how we have seen nature as an economic tool or a means towards colonial expansion. The poems' interplay between fragmentary, lyrical rhythms and historical sources achieve a striking musicality and demonstrate a finely-tuned sense of political and poetic intelligence." -Peter Jaeger"In J. R. Carpenter's latest collection we find an elemental fugue of poly-directional longing, a vibrational living archive, a weathering syntax. Lines form spindles of listening and observing, offering language as a measure of intimacy, environment, and history. By measure we might mean a kind of ascertaining, an assessing, a travelling over, a unit of expression, a rhythm, a course of action. Tightly attuned to the sonic valence of lyric, our speaker turns their poetic apostrophe to the pleasures and dangers of grouping and enumeration. The effect is at once controlled and cascading. In these poems we time travel, we ache from the effort, we speculate, sing, and surrender. Measures of Weather is sensuous and expansive, lamenting, and intricate. A poetic enquiry attuned to the forces of violence, place, embodiment, scale, and orientation. A craftwork of altering energies and propositional forms conducted by desire and sky." -Maria Sledmere

J. R. Carpenter's poems have an eye for detail and an ear for the sounds of York in both past and present, inviting the reader to experience the city for the first time, regardless of whether they've ever been. City of Marvels is a poetic geography and Carpenter has given us both the route and the compass.

From the late 15th century onwards, a flurry of voyages were made into the North Atlantic in search of fish, the fabled Northwest Passage, and beyond into the territories purely imaginary. Today, this vast expanse is crisscrossed with ocean and wind currents, submarine cables and wireless signals, seabirds and passengers, static and cargo ships. In her long-awaited poetry debut, award-winning digital writer and artist J.R. Carpenter transforms the dense, fragmented archive of the North Atlantic into an astonishing sea of fresh new text. Cartographic and maritime vernaculars inflected with the syntax and grammar of ships logs and code languages splinter and pulse across the page. Haunting, politically charged and formally innovative, An Ocean of Static presents an ever-shifting array of variables. Amid global currents of melting sea ice and changing ocean currents, Carpenter charts the elusive passages of women and animals, of indigenous people and migrants, of strange noises and phantom islands.

GENERATION(S) expands upon a series of short fictions generated by Python scripts adapted (with permission) from two 1k story generators written by Nick Montfort, and incorporates GORGE, a never-ending tract spewing verse approximations, poetic paroxysms on food, consumption, decadence and desire, a hack of Montfort's elegant poetry generator Taroko Gorge. There was only one rule in creating GENERATION(S): No new texts. All the texts in this book were previously published in some way. The texts the generators produce are intertwined with the generators' source code, and these two types of texts are in turn interrupted by excerpts from the meta narrative that went into their creation. Most of the sentences in the fiction generators started off as Tweets, which were then pulled into Facebook. Some led to comments that led to responses that led to new texts. All these stages of intermediation are represented in the print book iteration of GENERATION(S). (jr c)