New Books In Literature

The city of Dublin, with its ancient cobblestones, historic pubs, and legendary river Liffey, has been a source of inspiration for writers and poets for centuries. Though it might provide a creative buzz, modern city existence can often prove exhausting for the contemporary poet constantly bombarded with new sights, sounds, and smells, as well as the increasing pull of technology, with smartphone apps and messages vying for attention, offering new ways of interacting with the history of the city, or with imagined versions of it. Adam Wyeth’s new experimental poetry collection about:blank (Salmon Poetry, 2021) takes the city of Dublin as its setting and depicts the pressures of contemporary urban life by expanding the poetic form to include a variety of genres and short forms: monologue, dialogue, and instructions for yoga poses. These narratives are interwoven to give readers a remarkable impression of contemporary human existence and the ways that human consciousness is shaped by myth, literary references,