Ragged Disclosures

Ragged Disclosures is a prose poetry collection that investigates liminality, intersubjectivity and the prose poetic sequence. These sequences combine to create a complex and distributed depiction of an intimate relationship during the COVID-19 pandemic in this era of climate change and political instability. As the volume considers the protagonists’ diverse experiences, it explores the development of connected poetic tropes while highlighting tensions between prose poetry’s compression and the countervailing tendency for sequential works to present an unfolding narrative arc. The inherent raggedness of the narrative gestures, combined with prose poetry’s condensed and suggestive boxes, is playful, contemporary and quintessentially poetic.

‘Hovering with the intensities of volatility and stasis, Paul Hetherington’s exquisite slices of text limn the many paradoxes at the centre of prose poetry. Made from heartbreak and from hope, this remarkable collection transports us from ‘the end of the normal’ to contemplations of when ‘language opens the world again.’ Perceptive and piercingly tender, Hetherington’s poems offer echolocation for a world that’s become increasingly triangulated by longing. Ragged Disclosures instils the sense that—in poetry at least—we could yet be ‘all wing and a wild idea of flight’.’

Mags Webster

‘The poems in Ragged Disclosures are clever entanglements of two—two bodies moving through time and space; two voices disclosing physical and emotional sensitivities; two minds reckoning with the world that was, is and will be. This extended sequence tests the elasticity of prose poetry to encompass the complexities of contemporary relationships. Buoyed by the dual energies of poetry’s gesture and narrative’s momentum, Hetherington moves language ever closer to the ineffable experience of human intimacy.’

Jessica Wilkinson