atomised

by  robin boothroyd

With this project, begun in 2014 and still ongoing, Robin Boothroyd breaks language down into its constituent parts – atomises it – and sometimes fuses it back together. Through wordplay, bastardisation, rupture and erasure, these playful, experimental and revelatory micro-poems, inspired by the work of Aram Saroyan and Ian Hamilton Finlay, fathom worlds within words. 

“Hey listen poetry is about language first and it's more artificial than speaking even. So if a poetry is reduced down to its atoms, small clusters of letters, single words and their slight variations, misspellings, mishearings, well that's important literary work. And hey listen Robin Boothroyd is not only able to do this, which is hard, because the smaller poems get the more every single tiny gesture is exposed, but he has done it with a humour which suggests a great emotional intelligence as well as a linguistic, poetical, intellectual one. Atomised is a concentrated gem of a book. It's Brain Eno and a whole whale. It's froth and sore eros. You'd be lucky to see it slowly!”
- SJ Fowler

5€