Friday 27 Sept
6:30-9pm
Join us at Burley Fisher Books for an evening to mark and celebrate the publication of the twelfth title in Tenement’s “yellowjacket” series, Edwina Attlee’s debut collection a great shaking—with readings from Attlee, Jen Calleja, Grace Connolly Linden, and Tom Betteridge.
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Edwina Attlee’s debut collection, a great shaking, is a triptych of works—a gathering of songs, days, and hours—that detail the ways in which ‘a table can be overturned,’ an idea can be tilled, an hour can turn from something germinal to a quiet, static object of attention.
Gustav Landauer wrote that ‘the State is not something which can be destroyed by a revolution but is a condition’—something impacted by the weather systems of our moods, by the small winds of our behaviour. In these poems, Attlee antagonises our consent to be governed, our will to be moved (in terms either emotive, temporal, or meteorological) to consider our ‘condition.’ ‘I want to tell you about the time conversations started to happen / and how it was the beginning of the room,’ Attlee writes. Caught within an architectonic wherein chance and design go bet on the horses, wherein we lose step with the gamble of a metaphor, Attlee segues her way through these collated hours and days to distil a poetry that is not about (or of) revolution, but about a romance of interrelations, constellations, and zodiacal time. Wheeling between voices and buildings—animals and animus—Attlee’s is a poetry about steam; about diction; about dogs and childhood; about the organisation of thought; the congealed milk in a tapioca pudding; about ‘barefoot buildings’ and ‘ziggurat blue,’ desire lines and the ‘unbearable order’ of things. Her verse serves as a paean to naïve interrogation (how does a year contain its days?) to illustrate a struggle, at the site of the speaking self, per what it means to speak in a world warped by the weft of conditionality.
In a great shaking, we’ve a suite of poems that suggest, to depict ‘the beginning of the room,’ you need first question the porousness of its boundaries, the fact of its enclosure; the ways in which ‘it is,’ as Attlee writes ‘so elaborate to be alive.’
In this beautiful, funny and innovative book, an important new poetic voice has emerged.
—Rebecca Tamás, The Guardian
Both intimate and vast, a great shaking is like a skyline touched only by trees, land, and the stillness of forgotten time.
—Vanessa Onwuemezi
a great shaking is such a rich gathering: endlessly surprising, bold and inventive.
—Lavinia Singer
A deeply affecting collection; these poems come from a very genuine sense of communion with all those semi-visible individuals who labour and have always laboured for love, family and fairness.
—Lesley Harrison
Edwina Attlee is the author of two pamphlets, Roasting Baby (if a leaf falls press, 2016) and the cream (Clinic, 2016). She teaches history to students of architecture in London. a great shaking (Tenement Press, 2024) is her first collection.
Jen Calleja is the author of Vehicle (Prototype, 2023), Dust Sucker (Makina Books, 2023) and the forthcoming Goblinhood: Goblin as a Mode (Rough Trade Books, 2024). Calleja also translates German-language literature and is co-publisher at Praspar Press.
Grace Connolly Linden is a poet from London. Her work can be found in Prototype 5, The Journal of British and Irish Innovative Poetry and Datableed Zine. Her pamphlet Well was published by Veer2 (2022). She organises collaborative writing projects, most recently The Blacksmith and Project-Self-Detective. She also works as a secondary school teacher.
Tom Betteridge is a poet living in London. His pamphlets include Dog Shades (JUST NOT, 2023), Mudchute (Veer2, 2021) and Dressings (MATERIALS, 2019). With Ellen Dillon he co-edited The Journal of British and Irish Innovative Poetry’s special issue on Peter Manson’s poetry and translations, 2020.