Steak & Stations

Steak & Stations reports from a landscape of contrasts and contradictions: of speed and consumption, haute cuisine and isolated railway platforms; from nocturnal inner-city encounters to rural wildernesses where schoolgirls 'climb into the wind'. In this exhilarating debut collection, Michael Egan has developed a style of his own, a conversational staccato that compels you to reconstruct his dark, fragmented micro-narratives piece by piece. Shot through with surreal humour, experimentation and a keen political sensibility, these poems offer a peep-hole into the mysteries of domesticity, relationships and modern society. "This is the work of an exciting, younger poetic voice taking on the challenge of how to write about change as it happens, about the past slipping away from us and the future still invisible to our senses. Read it and imagine." Eleanor Rees Michael Egan lives in Liverpool and is a member of Edge Hill University's Poetry and Poetics Research Group. He is also the editor of The Binturong Review. Michael's poems have appeared in Erbacce, Great Works, Zafusy and Poetry Salzburg. A pamphlet, The River Swam, was published in 2005 and a second, Folklores, in 2010. Steak & Stations is his first full collection.

Table of Contents:
Steak steak! landfall three italians and a spaniard on his collar a blue bell she slapped him all about the floor books were strewn don't the taxis bomb it in wakefield I've had a belli full! the jobless man does nothing... I am no pre-raphaelite gizzards and heart calculations he'd said something at dinner only seen from uncanny angles I lied to the inquisition... monkey of my inkpot at the barber's blade... in lowering cages or back to the page with the gulls fox watcher on island road from here I imagine god's fist might plummet earthwards yellowed tree Crossed Out Stations free to drink experiential cross some short chronicles on the handkerchief tri-autumn unrobed we put up a calendar with pins d. dumaboc Station Stop roby edge hill sankey for penketh mossley hill huyton hartford waverley Further Fragments von zadora-gerlof's skull anglo-australian rice eagles cumberland road after the plough boats

About the Author :
Michael Egan lives in Liverpool and is a member of Edge Hill University's Poetry and Poetics Research Group. He is the editor of The Binturong Review. Michael's poems have appeared in Erbacce, Great Works, Zafusy and Poetry Salzburg. A pamphlet, The River Swam, was published in 2005 and a second, Folklores, in 2010. Steak & Stations is his first full collection.

Review :
This is the work of an exciting, younger poetic voice taking on the challenge of how to write about change as it happens, about the past slipping away from us and the future still invisible to our senses. Read it and imagine. - Eleanor Rees Steak and Stations comprises a fine array of sharply-observed, well-turned verses whose Scouse wit counterpoints their seriousness. Tea and cake is taken, urban foxes thread through nighttown, scenes are domestic and often erotic, and the Holy Grail gets abandoned outside a Liverpool Oxfam. These are poems in and of the world which nevertheless dream all night of the impossibility of the everyday: 'the same only seen from uncanny angles.' - Scott Thurston