136 x 200mm, 52 pages, Risograph printing, Saddle stitched, Softcover, 2024

Part elegy, part love poem, and with the springy insistence of an epistolary text, it shows how the agonies, elations, and ‘disordered rhythms’ of those modes might combine into a strange emulsion. Through a process of ‘glitchy metonymy’, the people examined here so intently (a mother, an aunt, a lover called Cope) become equivalent to other objects in the world, like a road or a rock or a shrubbery; the poem also allows for the possibility that those objects may get up and speak. (‘We lilies want to swap our aphorisms for legs.’) Even as Eccles reaches out to a ‘vegetablish chorus’ of interlocutors - Prynne, Proust, Blanchot, Baldwin, Weber, Kierkegaard - for observations on love, grief, language and labour, the poem immediately metabolises them as part of a vividly-evoked ongoing life. I VISIT MY AUNT is an ambient symposium which happens in the open air, among plants and flowers, while pretending to take a phone call, during a pause of unspecified length, while asleep.

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