Sentences from the Archive

 Instead of time you give me facts.

Jen Webb’s new collection is a series of striking prose poems that explore the ways in which personal crises and memories might be re-examined through the elusive concept of the archive. How, she asks, might we construct a personal archive to ‘make sense of the past in the work of facing and building the future’? Each of these finely wrought poems is a record of life lived through significant moments.

‘Webb knows how to bring into her paragraphs of poetry the intimate, almost chaotic fluidity of living through one crisis after another—missing a bus, being knocked from a boat, the unexpected death of a friend—it is all here, archived and uncanny.’ KEVIN BROPHY

‘Intensely lyrical, often dire, Jen Webb’s prose poems are sensual in that word’s fullest meaning—of the senses, of the body. The poems become erotic because sensation is where eroticism lives alongside hunger, fury, and all our other urgencies; because “only that makes sense right now.” KATHARINE COLES

‘In all, Sentences from the Archives is a delight. For both aficionados of the prose poem and lovers of poetry in general, it provides many moments of pleasure and insight.’ – John Foulcher writing in Cordite Poetry Review.