The Culture of My Stuff

The Culture of My Stuff is a collection of sonnets, prose, and political nonsense rhymes. Light-footed and light-fingered, the poems piece the stuff of their culture into surreal polemic and elegy, compressing and exploding their 'various vocabularies.' Brexit, Trump, Northern Ireland, Komodo dragons, the male gaze, Leonard Cohen, lapsed Protestantism, David Bowie, horror cinema, and typos are considered from a distance that's swiftly diminished by complicity, sorrow, and self-critique. Unable to transcend the consumerist violence of the world they confront and embrace, the poems nonetheless strive for emotional accuracy and lyric depth, giving form to a voice that revels in contradiction, excess, mischief, and music.

Adam Crothers was born in Belfast in 1984 and lives in Cambridge. His first collection, Several Deer, won the 2017 Shine/Strong Poetry Award and the 2017 Seamus Heaney Centre Prize.