You Have No Normal Country To Return To - Softcover

Tom Sastry

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1913437345 ISBN 13: 9781913437343

Publisher: Nine Arches Press, 2022

Synopsis

In You have no normal country to return to, Tom Sastry explores questions of national identity and ‘the end of history'. A blistering, bleakly funny and timely second poetry collection, following his Seamus Heaney First Collection Prize shortlisted, A Man's House Catches Fire.

By turns crisply satirical and questioning, You have no normal country to return to ranges across the legacies of Empire, postwar migration and the current crisis in English identity. Sastry’s precise, brilliantly attuned poetry asks how the times we live in and the tales we tell about them affect us; how our emotional landscapes are shaped by national myths and the more personal stories we tell about ourselves. It is a book about illusion, and discovering, again and again, that what was once taken for granted was never really there; a guidebook for an age of 'enchantments collapsing on themselves'

About this title

About the Author

Tom Sastry has been described by Hera Lindsay Bird as a 'magician of deadpan'. He was chosen by Carol Ann Duffy as one the 2016 Laureate's Choice poets. Since then, his poems have appeared in The Guardian, Poetry Review and he has been highly commended in the Forward Prize. Tom’s first collection A Man's House Catches Fire was shortlisted for the Seamus Heaney Prize. His pamphlet, Complicity was a Poetry School Book of the Year and a Poetry Book Society pamphlet choice. Tom lives and works in Bristol.

Edition details

• Publisher: Nine Arches Press
• Publication date: 2022
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1913437345
• ISBN 13: 9781913437343
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 72