RENDANG (Wesleyan Poetry Series)

Product Description

Using long poems, ekphrasis, and ruptured forms,
RENDANG is a startling new take on the self, and how an identity is constructed. Drawing on his Anglo-Indonesian heritage, Will Harris shows us new ways to think about the contradictions of identity and cultural memory. He creates companions that speak to us in multiple languages. They deftly ask us to consider how and what we look at, as well as what we don’t look at and why. It is intellectual and accessible, moving and experimental, and combines a linguistic innovation with a deep emotional rooting.

“The Hanged Man”

He bought a seeded loaf and two ripe and ready avocados
and left them in the hallway, and at lunch the next day went
to Chipotle on Charing Cross Road, then back to work,

and afterwards bought a ring doughnut from Tesco
because there were no jam doughnuts.

That night, though he didn’t think he was a hoarder,
he started ordering records online and soon he had bought
the whole of Bruce Springsteen’s back catalogue.

I hate Bruce Springsteen, he thought.
I want to eat better.

The next week, listening to
Human Touch, he dozed
and woke to find himself floating two feet off the ground.

Hanging there. His parents were alive and dead.
If only he could keep completely still he could remain
unscattered, forever on the edge of rain.

Review

“Will Harris takes British poetry into new waters:
RENDANG is an astonishing debut. These questing poems rend and render, they tear and they give. Slipping between the everyday and the unreal, between crystalline lyric and a roving, essayistic expansiveness, their shapeshifting delves into the self and its precarious foundations… Many are heart-stopping: the kind of poem that makes you put down the book for a while just to breathe.”–Sarah Howe, winner of the T.S. Eliot Prize
“Harris’s poems turn the utterance back to ourselves, opening a dialogue between us, our modernity, the depth of our loss and the weight of our remembering. Where epithets rend memory from the moment, the artefacts of wounds heal themselves through a weft of irony, weaving language into a hard-earned scar.”–Sandeep Parmar

Review

“Will Harris takes British poetry into new waters:
RENDANG is an astonishing debut. These questing poems rend and render, they tear and they give. Slipping between the everyday and the unreal, between crystalline lyric and a roving, essayistic expansiveness, their shapeshifting delves into the self and its precarious foundations… Many are heart-stopping: the kind of poem that makes you put down the book for a while just to breathe.”―Sarah Howe, winner of the T.S. Eliot Prize

“Harris’s poems turn the utterance back to ourselves, opening a dialogue between us, our modernity, the depth of our loss and the weight of our remembering. Where epithets rend memory from the moment, the artefacts of wounds heal themselves through a weft of irony, weaving language into a hard-earned scar.”―Sandeep Parmar

About the Author

WILL HARRIS is a London-based poet who has published with the
Guardian, the
London Review of Books,
Granta,
The Poetry Review, and
The White Review.