The Martian's Regress

The new poetry collection from the winner of the Costa Poetry Award

A rippling, impeccable lyricism that’s delicious to read aloud, and a down-to-earth, deadpan violence that recalls Simon Armitage… If you haven’t discovered Morgan, this weird, unsettling trip is the perfect introduction.

Daily Telegraph *Poetry Book of the Month*

Startling... What it does exceptionally well is make clear what ecological catastrophe might feel like as well as look like... What a joy to read and re-read and re-read.

[J. O. Morgan] has quietly established himself as a gifted writer of the long poem... The Martian’s Regress is an imaginative leap… In portraying the variously hopeful, hopeless, comic and bleak ways of apparent aliens, Morgan brings us closer to ourselves.

The Martian’s Regress is a powerful long poem… An interesting and always accessible variation on a dystopian theme… The story remains taut and reverberates…[and] draws elements of humour even from dark places.

**SHORTLISTED FOR THE TS ELIOT PRIZE 2020** 
 
From the winner of the Costa Poetry Award 
 
A lone martian returns to Earth. He leaves behind him a hardened survivalist culture, its muddled myths and songs, its continued abuse of the environment that sustains it. During this journey back to the now-broken and long-abandoned mother planet, the martian begins to consider his own uncertain origins, and his own future. 
 
Cut off from his people, the martian's story is that of the individual: his duty at odds with his desire; the race of which he's still a part playing always on his mind, as well as the race that once was. This is the story of what life becomes when stripped of all that makes it worth living - of what humans become when they lose their humanity. 
 
The Martian's Regress is a brilliant, provocative, often darkly comic work that explores what a fragile environment eventually makes of those who persist in tampering with it.

Assurances

A compelling multi-layered narrative set in the early years of the Cold War from the award-winning Scottish poet.

I seriously doubt I will read a more significant book of poetry this year. The finale is truly affecting, a plangent and profound speck of light.

[JO Morgan's] remarkable new book Assurances [is] a gripping narrative poem.

**WINNER OF THE COSTA POETRY AWARD 2018** 
**SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2018 FORWARD PRIZE FOR BEST COLLECTION** 
 
A war-poem both historic and frighteningly topical, Assurances begins in the 1950s during a period of vigilance and dread in the middle of the Cold War: the long stand-off between nuclear powers, where the only defence was the threat of mutually assured destruction. 
 
Using a mix of versed and unversed passages, Morgan places moments of calm reflection alongside the tensions inherent in guarding against such a permanent threat. A work of variations and possibilities, we hear the thoughts of those involved who are trying to understand and justify their roles. We examine the lives of civilians who are not aware of the impending danger, as well as those who are. We listen to the whirring minds of machines; to the voice of the bomb itself. We spy on enemy agents: always there, always somewhere close at hand. 
 
Assurances is an intimate, dramatic work for many voices: lyrical, anxious, fragmentary and terrifying; a poem about the nuclear stalemate, the deterrent that is still in place today: how it works and how it might fail, and what will vanish if it does.

Interference Pattern

A brilliant new collection by the prize-winning Scottish poet

Eliot comes repeatedly to mind in reading Interference Pattern because, in its tragic grandeur and sophistication, it is a poem that could come to be for the twenty-first century what The Waste Land was to the twentieth.

This collection carries you, unnerves and stimulates.  It absolutely meets TS Eliot’s requirement that poetry be “genuine”… It is vividly miscellaneous poetry…bracing, original.

Interference Pattern teases us at every turn, inviting us to try to unlock its secrets while keeping the keys just out of sight… The multifarious voices in the book mostly speak over each other but occasionally to each other, creating an intricate web of echoes and half-echoes.

At first, these extraordinary poems may unsettle and disturb, but the next reading could be one of rapture and astonishment; it all hinges on your point of view. Like the optical illusion of the maiden and the crone, you can only see one image at a time; the brain deciding which is the figure and which the background. It is a book that acts out its own subjects – dualities, ambiguities, boundaries – through physical dislocation, through patterns of interference. 
 
This is a collage of many voices: eager or dispassionate, unreliable or matter-of-fact – depending, as with everything else, on your angle of entry. Some of the voices fear involvement; some are afraid of doing nothing; some, perhaps, have already gone too far. Like the image on the cover, these pieces shimmer and buzz in their own instability. Is this punishment or reward? What is the yellow smoke? Will there be bodies floating under the plastic pool-cover? Are we, like the hotel manager, seeing visions? 
 
Volatile, troubling, but endlessly interesting, these poems show J. O. Morgan working and compressing language into a precarious, frictional state. As a result, Interference Pattern is a unique reading experience: vivid, challenging and completely original.

J. O. Morgan

Shortlisted for the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction 2022

**Finalist for the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction 2022 ** 
 
From the Costa Award winner, a highly inventive and and humane novel about our relationship with technology and our addiction to innovation. 
 
This is the tale of a new technology, an alternative history that unfolds over many decades. It is a fable told through a constantly shifting cast of characters, all drawn into the world of a machine that slowly alters every life it touches. 
 
But in this unending quest for progress, what will happen to the things that make us human: the memories, the fears, the love, the mortality? As we push towards a brave new world, what do we stand to lose? 
 
'Such a super novel' Wendy Erskine 
 
'A clever book...that will have you thinking about the machines in your own life' Sunday Times

J. O. Morgan

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