A BOOK OF POETRY AND PROSE FROM DENISE RILEY, ONE OF BRITAIN’S FINEST WRITERS

With her striking poetic gifts, Denise Riley is as happy in traditional forms as experimental, and though her poetry has a kinship to that of the New York School, at heart she is unaligned with any tribe. A distinguished philosopher and feminist theorist as well as a poet, Riley has produced a body of work that is both intellectually uncompromising and emotionally open. This book, her first collection of poems to appear with an American book publisher, includes Riley’s widely acclaimed recent volume Say Something Back,a lyric meditation on bereavement composed, as she has written, “in imagined solidarity with the endless others whose adult children have died, often in far worse circumstances.” Riley’s new prose work, Time Lived, Without Its Flow, returns to the subject of grief, just as grief returns in memory to be continually relived. “This book is without a scrap of sentimentality but provokes a deep emotional response: not from poignancy but in awe at the precision with which Riley records her grief. It is often too painful to read, but too valuable not to.” —John Self, The Guardian “[Riley’s] writing is perfectly weighted, justifies its existence. It is impossible not to want to ‘say something back’ to each of her poems in recognition of their outstanding quality. Her voice is strong and beautiful—an imperative in itself. But her subject is not strength—it is more that she is robust about frailty.” —Kate Kellaway, The Observer