“In poems at once energetic, tense, and original, Stephen Daniels' first pamphlet compellingly explores everyday experiences. By turns funny and poignant, Tell Mistakes I Love Them is a refreshing debut.” Carrie Etter
“What Stephen
Daniels does here is to lead us with wit and wisecrack absurdities over to the
other side of the looking-glass and then leave us there staring at our scary
selves, unable to put back together the uneven pieces of our daily eruptions
and catastrophes. This is humanity caught botching it through life, but
Stephen’s choice is to float over the nausea and master the downwards flying
that is our constant falling.” Cristina
Navazo-Eguía Newton
“Stephen
Daniels’ poems deal with the difficulty of growing in an uncomfortable world.
These poems are structured to be as uncomfortable as the stories they reveal,
they are awkward and honest, show the true damage of childhood shame rising
into adulthood – they take unexpected turns: human trauma in a real twisted,
surreal reality. A striking first pamphlet!” Hilda Sheehan
“Stephen Daniels
takes the ordinary, the everyday and makes it strange and sinister – revealing
how ordinary life is, in fact, rooted in strangeness. Daniels takes us on a
journey through childhood and modern family life. But these are not happy or
sentimental poems; they don’t shy away from the more difficult aspects of
domestic life – often exploring ideas of miscommunication, regret and how
families are casually cruel to one another. Daniels is a master recreating the
implied sense of threat that often lurks behind the everyday. The language of
the poems is deceptively light and playful, which make them a joy to read: “we
stole a real imaginary lorry/that smelled of circus” (Grounded), but the real
power of these poems is in the way he uses surreal and sometimes disjointed
language in the spinning of his tales. The effect is not unlike finding
yourself in a dream where everything is slightly off kilter. This wrong-footing
made me want to revisit the poems again and again – and on each reading I
discovered something new and exciting. Daniels is definitely a poet worth
watching.” Julia Webb
Tell Mistakes I
Love Them exposes social nerves and pokes at the wounds with
poems that are very vulnerable and very poignant.
A sample poem from the collection may be enjoyed below.
R.R.P. £6.50
PRE-ORDER a copy of now, using the paypal link below. (Tell Mistakes I Love Them is officially released on June 5, 2017. Pre-orders will be sent out in the week of publication.)
From Tell Mistakes I Love Them:
Grounded
Yesterday,
when we were nine,
we stole a
real imaginary lorry
that smelled
of circus.
It had an
elephant engine
with a
flame-juggler sound.
It had
unicycle seats
and
lion-tamer windows
which we
stole together
but stopped
before the trapeze started.
Then we saw
the shadow runners.
A tightrope
chase caught us
with one leg
over the fence
and the other
not.
An ankle-drag
pull
and we’re
chained to the big-top prison
waiting for
acrobats to take us home,
made to place
our heads
into the
roaring mouth of our lion-angry mum.
Our
punishment, a ringmaster ear-clip
and a bedroom
full of sad clown faces.
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