150 x 230mm, 84 pages, full colour printing, perfect bound, 2019

This is a considerable book of poetic inarticulation, swamping somewhere in between poetry, notation for future projects forever unrealised, forgetful scrawlings, childhood dream illustrations, erratic geometry, collage and quotation. Memmoirs attempts to operate on multiple fronts, and fails, as is the history of such abundance conflict. In such rich, potent territory Steve presents us with a number of possibilities;

the handwritten as a viable poetry
the notebook as a finished poetry
to emphasise context over content, or at least blend and blind the two
to be as strange and unfortunately amusing as living mostly is
to be about where it was made (Spain, mostly) and what it was made from (a single notebook of bone coloured paper, a christmas gift, and some bad black pens, and some fingerpaint)

It is the fifth entry in SJ Fowler’s Poem Brut publication series, which as a press and as a poet have supported with enthusiasm This series strives to embrace environment affecting writing and writing affecting environment. Joyously celebrates the obscure movement of the hand, writing, lining, drawing – deliberately plain, worked, smoggy. This series of books are definitely about the grid, the box, the cloud, the tree, where the words are meant to make you squint, to battle for legibility, rather than you be able to pinch and extend your thumb and forefinger against the page to get a closer look. Steve's Poem Brut work and project foregrounds handwriting, illustrating that it is more interesting than type, as are crossings out, as are notes, strange lines, grids made with rulers – constant gestures toward the homemade, the amateur, towards composition and motion. The Poem Brut is very much an invitation to head towards liquid and wood, attractive ugliness, toilet wall draughtsmanship, doodled portraits, minor collage.

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