All Just

A dazzling collection influenced by the playful spirit of "New York school" poets such as John Ashbery and Frank O'Hara, these poems play with broken phrases, wrenching idioms, expressions from various contexts, conversations. Finding ways to be direct and coherent, to explore without losing the way in the elaborate switchback systems that language has become, this compilation wonders about place and its limitation as it wanders through documents and other people's words.

David Herd is a poet, a critic, and a teacher. He is a lecturer at the University of Kent and the author of Mandleson! Mandleson! A Memoir. His recent essays on poetry and politics have appeared in publications such as Almost Island, Parallax, and PN Review.