Carcanet online book launch: The City by Stav Poleg

Stav Poleg launches her much-anticipated debut collection The City with an online reading and discussion with fellow Carcanet poet Lisa Kelly. The new book (out in the UK on 31 March) includes work from her 2017 pamphlet Lights, Camera, along with pieces that featured in the New Poetries VIII anthology, published by Manchester’s Carcanet Press last year. Some of the poems have appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry London, Poetry Ireland Review and PN Review.

The new book (out in the UK on 31 March) includes work from her 2017 pamphlet Lights, Camera, along with pieces that featured in the New Poetries VIII anthology, published by Manchester’s Carcanet Press last year.

Divided into three sections – “Camera”, “Another City” and “After-Party” – as the collection’s title suggests, it is about cities: what they contain and what they lack. The title poem includes the lines: “London. A waitress with eyes like stained glass. / Think Soho stilettoes, fake mascara, cheap champagne.“

The poems feel cinematic and in constant motion, as the publisher’s blurb says: “fascinated by the freedom of motion and its constraints: how by means of technique they defy the gravity that draws them down the page to a conclusion. They subvert what they see and, as language, they also subvert how they see: we are always seeing but with all our senses, including our ears and our semantic facilities, our echo detector, how the poems relate to one another and how they relate to the worlds of art and invention in different modes and ages.”

Stav Poleg regularly collaborates with fellow poets, artists and filmmakers – her graphic-novel installation, Dear Penelope: Variations On An August Morning, created with artist Laura Gressani, was acquired by the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art in 2014. She teaches for the Poetry School, London, and serves on the editorial board of Magma Poetry.

She is joined for this event by another Magma Poetry board member (and the current co-Chair with Gboyega Odubanjo), Lisa Kelly. Lisa’s debut collection, A Map Towards Fluency, was published by Carcanet in June 2019 and shortlisted for the Michael Murphy Memorial Poetry Prize 2021.

As always with Carcanet Press events, extracts of the text will be shown during the reading so that you can read along, and audience members will have the opportunity to ask their own questions. Registration for this online event is £2, redeemable against the cost of the book – attendees will receive a discount code and details of how to get hold of the new book during and after the event.