Stephen Sexton Libri

Memories of going 'through the looking-glass' into the land of video games are some of the most evocative of all childhood. In these poems we are rushed back to years spent playing Super Mario World, a place where people are small and flowers are large, a place of treacherous labyrinths and heart-stopping leaps of faith, where the materiality, wonder and peril of that world bleeds into our own as the young player bravely travels with his mother on the journey of her life-ending illness. Drawing on traditions of elegy and pastoral, this is a daring, moving and lyrically beautiful exploration of memory, grief and the unreal.

Oils is the debut pamphlet of the award-winning Stephen Sexton. It is a gorgeous, beguiling collection of poems. Through his portraits of an atheist, a pickpocket and a spinach-loving sailor (among others), Sexton evokes a strange kind of melancholy as he strives to reconcile passion with detachment and profound self-doubt with unwavering love.

"history is what we call / what might have happened differently / and didn't"It is the decade of centuries, and Cheryl tells us our fortune. Radicals liberate a zoo, teenagers flirt in a bowling alley, and the dead are cherished. In these inventive, playful, dream-like poems, Stephen Sexton takes us on a journey through the past and the present, while Cheryl translates from the future, showing us how we exist in all three at once.Reckoning with both public and private tragedies, the book is divided into three parts. In Part One, the poems range across old Europe: 'Edelweiss' and Titanic setting sail, to a transatlantic, cross-century symposium in Part Two, where W.B. Yeats and Billy Corgan of the Smashing Pumpkins perfect their arts in collaboration. In Part Three we are back in the land where the past keeps breaking through, it's practically always the anniversary of something terrible, but there's always Cheryl in the moonlight and her deck of tarot cards.A thrillingly strange exploration of the comfort of the fantastical when the real is hard to bear, Cheryl's Destinies is the enchanting follow-up to the Forward Prize-winning If All the World and Love Were Young, by one of the most exciting young poets writing today.