Heritage Aesthetics

(Paperback)

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Description

Witty and wide-ranging, Heritage Aesthetics draws from Anthony's family'smigratory histories - between Cyprus and the UK - to interrogate patriarchy,xenophobia and national divides. Spanning from the British Empire to thecontemporary moment, Anaxagorou unpacks the travelogues of colonialwriters and military men alongside experiences of racism in the present.

Yet this collection never settles into being 'about' identity or contemporaryculture. Anthony's adept, eviscerating eye continues to complicate - looking athow perception is shaped, how we perform our politics, and how we love whatis hard to love. Offering no easy answers, Anaxagorou instead calls for adeeper interrogation of the ways in which we're living and performing.

Fearless, intensely honest and hopeful, Heritage Aesthetics merges Anthony'sgift for performance and his brilliant experimentation with form to create avivid insistence to communicate a self in the world.

Reviews

One of the most politically engaged poets of our time... Uncompromisingly inventive, Heritage Aesthetics taps into the discordant music of our time and stops us in our tracks -- Kit Fan, author of Diamond Hill
An education in empathy and its limitations, the liminality and porousness of nations, histories, races and memory... This is poetry bordering on pure imagination, one that makes its own conditions for living in the now -- Sandeep Parmar

Author Bio

Anthony Anaxagorou is a British-born Cypriot poet, fictionwriter, essayist, publisher and poetry educator. His poetryhas been published in POETRY, The Poetry Review, PoetryLondon, New Statesman, Granta, and elsewhere. His workhas also appeared on BBC Newsnight, BBC Radio 4, ITV,Vice UK, Channel 4 and Sky Arts. His second collectionAfter the Formalities published with Penned in the Marginsis a Poetry Book Society Recommendation and was shortlisted for the 2019 T.S Eliot Prize. It was also a Telegraph andGuardian poetry book of the year. In 2020 he publishedHow To Write It with Merky Books; a practical guide fused with tips and memoir looking at the politics of writing as well as the craft of poetry and fiction along with the wider publishing industry. He was awarded the 2019 H-100 Award for writing and publishing, and the 2015 Groucho Maverick Award for his poetry and fiction. In 2019 he was made an honorary fellow of the University of Roehampton. Anthony is artistic director of Out-Spoken, a monthly poetry and music night held at London's Southbank Centre, and publisher of Out-Spoken Press.