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Forgetfulness
Paperback
ISBN13: 9781837380114
Publisher: Shearsman Books
Published: Jan 9 2026
Pages: 80
Weight: 0.23
Height: 0.19 Width: 5.50 Depth: 8.50
Language: English
In its tragicomic navigation of different forms of loss, Forgetfulness moves from the allegorical to the abstract lyric, through to the surreal-absurd, and finally to a series of splintered memories. It is a collection which seeks to re-construct and re-inhabit the past through the truths of imagination and fiction, as well as the storytelling of remembrance. Throughout these pages, the end is uncertain, forever in the making, and only possibly true.
Ian Seed's Forgetfulness is broken open both more formally and emotionally than his other books to date, with room for intimate, if seemingly casual, Joe Brainard-like rememberings of the newly or long since passed (his mother, father, grandparents, an old friend, a childhood), interspersed with dream-like lyrics and the more familiar (with sly defamiliarisation around every bend) prose poems. There's no desperate shoring against ruins going on in the gathering together of these fragments and styles. Nor is there simply a postmodern scattering of them in amongst the ashes. There's exemplary care and attention in the arrangement of word and memory, dream and fantasy. Also in the perhaps ultimately hopeful acknowledgement of the extent to which we know nothing; the uncertainty of all our stories 'where we lose / ourselves in the spaces as they appear / slipping through our fingers, open and bright' ('Roles').-Jeremy Over
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