Our Death - Sean Bonney

A reckless voyage into the apocalypse against which we hurl ourselves night after night, entirely political and thus relentlessly personal, self-lacerating, perhaps a bit disordered, no doubt perilously lucid. Moving through the shards of the decade’s social movements and the torments of persisting within the wreckage, the book forms a complex web of lament and refusal. Its guides are Pasolini, Baudelaire, and especially Katerina Gogou, the great Greek poet, anarchist, and suicide. Our guide is Bonney himself, and there is none like him.

SEAN BONNEY has performed his work at protests, in occupations, in seminar rooms, on picket lines, in the back rooms of pubs and at international poetry festivals. His poetry has been translated into several languages. He is currently based in Berlin. This is the follow-up to the widely celebrated Letters Against the Firmament, and his first book to be published in the US.

Excerpt (from “Our Death”)

ffs all of us bastards of capital. yeh we deserve everything we get.

ghosts or jack-knives or angels. whatever we call it. makes no difference.

landlines and blowjobs and public urinals. night sweats and centuries.

centuries. that’s a laugh. say it. say guillotine. say razor say fuck it.

our passports are all expired. we wait on the runway. we are saying nothing.

say leprosy say burn it all down say bloodflash. say petroleuses.

say jesus too, whatever. don’t believe a world. coziness. whatever.

running crying to the bosses with those fucking holes in your hands.

April 15, 2019