Disinformation
Frances Leviston's first collection, Public Dream, was one of the most acclaimed debuts of recent years, and praised for combining "technical mastery with a lucidity that verges on the hypnotic" by the Independent. Leviston's keenly-anticipated second book sees both an intellectual and dramatic intensification of her project. We often credit poetry as a kind of truth-telling, but it can also be an agent and a vessel of disinformation: in the course of making its proofs and confessions, it also seeks to persuade and seduce by any means it can. Leviston uses both sides of poetry's tongue to address one of the key questions of the age: how have we come to know what we think we know? In the title poem, a woman preparing for a child's birthday party suddenly glimpses the invisible screen of false data behind which she lives—and her own complicity in its power. Many of these poems are concerned with ruined or abandoned structures, dismembered and disappearing bodies, constructed and deconstructed identities; behind them lie the false gods who manipulate the streams of information with which we must navigate the contemporary world. In Leviston's inimitably vivid and vital language, Disinformation challenges us to rescue our idea of identity from that mass of glib truth and persistent falsehood—and proposes how we might begin to think of poetry itself as a means to that end.
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Disinformation
Frances Leviston's first collection, Public Dream, was one of the most acclaimed debuts of recent years, and praised for combining "technical mastery with a lucidity that verges on the hypnotic" by the Independent. Leviston's keenly-anticipated second book sees both an intellectual and dramatic intensification of her project. We often credit poetry as a kind of truth-telling, but it can also be an agent and a vessel of disinformation: in the course of making its proofs and confessions, it also seeks to persuade and seduce by any means it can. Leviston uses both sides of poetry's tongue to address one of the key questions of the age: how have we come to know what we think we know? In the title poem, a woman preparing for a child's birthday party suddenly glimpses the invisible screen of false data behind which she lives—and her own complicity in its power. Many of these poems are concerned with ruined or abandoned structures, dismembered and disappearing bodies, constructed and deconstructed identities; behind them lie the false gods who manipulate the streams of information with which we must navigate the contemporary world. In Leviston's inimitably vivid and vital language, Disinformation challenges us to rescue our idea of identity from that mass of glib truth and persistent falsehood—and proposes how we might begin to think of poetry itself as a means to that end.
17.95 In Stock
Disinformation

Disinformation

by Frances Leviston
Disinformation

Disinformation

by Frances Leviston

Paperback

$17.95 
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Overview

Frances Leviston's first collection, Public Dream, was one of the most acclaimed debuts of recent years, and praised for combining "technical mastery with a lucidity that verges on the hypnotic" by the Independent. Leviston's keenly-anticipated second book sees both an intellectual and dramatic intensification of her project. We often credit poetry as a kind of truth-telling, but it can also be an agent and a vessel of disinformation: in the course of making its proofs and confessions, it also seeks to persuade and seduce by any means it can. Leviston uses both sides of poetry's tongue to address one of the key questions of the age: how have we come to know what we think we know? In the title poem, a woman preparing for a child's birthday party suddenly glimpses the invisible screen of false data behind which she lives—and her own complicity in its power. Many of these poems are concerned with ruined or abandoned structures, dismembered and disappearing bodies, constructed and deconstructed identities; behind them lie the false gods who manipulate the streams of information with which we must navigate the contemporary world. In Leviston's inimitably vivid and vital language, Disinformation challenges us to rescue our idea of identity from that mass of glib truth and persistent falsehood—and proposes how we might begin to think of poetry itself as a means to that end.

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9781447271147
Publisher: Pan Macmillan
Publication date: 02/12/2015
Pages: 80
Product dimensions: 5.90(w) x 7.60(h) x 0.40(d)

About the Author

Frances Leviston read English at St Hilda's College, Oxford. In 2006 she received an Eric Gregory Award from the Society of Authors. Public Dream, her first collection, was shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize, the Forward Prize for Best First Collection, and the Jerwood-Aldeburgh First Collection Prize. Her poems have appeared in Poetry, the London Review of Books, the Guardian, the Times, the TLS, and various anthologies. She works as a freelance writer and an occasional writing tutor.
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