CROWD WORK by Sam Furlong

Crowd Work is the venturous debut by writer Sam Furlong. With candour, its poems detail experiences of a body’s living, materialities it inhabits and shares with bodies and other species. Also, the qualities of pain, and the complexities and contradictions of intimacy.

From densely sculpted sonnets to capacious prose forms and ekphrasis, Furlong’s uses of image and tonal variation interweave voyeurism with masochisms and transfiguration. Devotional gestures are amplified from the private to many-voiced conversations, expressly in the sequence ‘Crowd Work’, an unflinching interrogation of the performative side of identity in stand-up’s public setting.

Radically amatory, this debut performs a body’s wanton poetries. Re-making forms, it renders explicit the means by which ‘Through breaking, we are made.’

The collection catalogues some small part of what she herself has referred to as the ‘compulsive journey’ of her poetry-making and verbal-visual improvisations across the past ten years.

Published by Macha Press
Edition of 500
64 pages
210 mm x 210 mm
ISBN 9781068769917