Join our new colleague, Dr Alex Wylie, for the debut of his new poetry collection, Secular Games.
Alex Wylie is launching his debut poetry collection, Secular Games, in the York Writing Room at 6pm on the 31st of October. Book your ticket here.
Alex has published poetry in such places as PN Review, Stand, The Financial Times, Agenda, The Yellow Nib, Glasgow Review of Books, Belle Ombre, and New Poetries V, and has been cited in the Guardian as an “exceptional new poet”. He is also a widely-published literary critic; as well as many recent articles on literature (Essays in Criticism, Literary Imagination, English: The Journal of the English Association, The Cambridge Quarterly, et al.), he is about to publish a book on the later work of Geoffrey Hill with Manchester University Press.
T.S. Eliot Prize-winning poet Ciaran Carson has written the following about Secular Games:
Alex Wylie’s first collection interrogates and celebrates our capacity for invention, swither, vision and delusion. Exuberant in their range of voice and register, the poems are technically adroit, happy to rhyme ‘TV’, with ‘topsy-turvy’ and ‘Teletubby’; or ‘weather’ with ‘whether’; elsewhere, ‘lyres’ metamorphose into ‘liars’. Darkness lurks behind the playful language. Reality is a series of alternatives, the toss of a coin, as adumbrated by Wylie’s fine version of Borges’ A una moneda. Sometimes elegantly ‘spinning out a single thread further than it should reasonably stretch’, sometimes honestly perplexed by ‘a thing you can’t believe is real but is’, Alex Wylie has written a book for our age.
Alex is a lecturer on the Liberal Arts Foundation Year at York St John University.