Will Harris’s Rendang (Granta, £12.99) is a sharp and assured debut collection that meditates on the multiplicity of identity, the shaky building blocks that make up a country and the politics of exhibition. It travels from actual terrains – in London, Chicago, Jakarta – to the surreal “purple rock” of “Planet Mongo”, and this exploratory curiosity is matched by the collection’s formal expansiveness, encompassing accomplished prose-poems, concrete poetry and lyric sequences. Harris suffuses the everyday with a mythic dignity, so that the drunk singing Otis Redding in a pub takes on the tragic stature of Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner and “bees groan inside / the carcass of the split bin bag” as Samson’s biblical riddle is brought to summer pavements to later “draw forth – not sweetness – something new”. As the speaker ticks “Other, Mixed” on forms, he muses that “some / drunk nights I theorize / my own transmembered norms”, wryly using the non-standard English “transmembered” to evade being trapped in bureaucratic boxes himself. The collection leans into a vocabulary all of its own, and announces itself as an artefact that will not be dislodged.
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Rendang by Will Harris; Art of Escape by Mina Gorji; Killing Kanoko / Wild Grass on the Riverbank by Itō Hiromi; and Hello by Crispin Best