The Recycling

Overview

Joey Connolly's funny and feverish second collection, The Recycling, considers dissolution and aftermath. Poems experiment with forms and histories, grieving for estrangement and heartbreak, haunted by climate anxiety. Connolly is always taking risks, recycling traditional poetics into a scrapheap of repurposed pages, rusted fastenings and glittering fragments. Ecopoetry has never looked quite like this before.

Reviews

'Connolly is one of our finest poets of the multitude, he is endlessly fascinated by all that swims through his vast universe, and his big-hearted verse is exhilarating, accepting and forgiving, as it is intelligent, warm and witty.' - Daljit Nagra 

'A kaleidoscopically varied, endlessly ambitious collection... Connolly's innovative, surprising language walks the high wire between joy, terror and collapse. This is a thrilling, tender, extraordinary book.' - Rebecca Támas 

'The Recycling is an act of brazen deferral, of repetition and self-plagiarism. It borrows wildly, testing the line between allusion and parody, while inventing its own "bric-a-brac idiolect". Strangely ersatz stories collapse into one another, time warping and distending, always about to expose a molten core of heartbreak... The result is a silly, sad and beautiful book.' - Will Harris

Author Biography

Joey Connolly grew up in Sheffield, studied in Manchester and now works in London as the Director of Faber Academy. He received an Eric Gregory award in 2012, and his first collection, Long Pass, was published by Carcanet in 2017.