Acharnement

Author: Ziddy Ibn Sharam

Publisher: Distance No Object (2021)

“Batten down the feuilletons! Buckle in the chartered accountants! Ziddy Ibn Sharam barges in and out of earshot, getting in gear to torment prefects, missionaries and tourists wagging their fingers at the express lane, gobbing scalpels in the whites of their eyes. Poetry isn't choir practice, isn't interminable committee meetings, isn't endless fucking workshops, and every now and then it touches off in uproarious acts of actually coruscating passion. Acharnement is one big fuck you to genteel avant-gardists everywhere, profane hate mail for the pompous and the boring fussing carefully at their politely ruffled epistles to the state. This is disrespectability politics, this is living paint stripper. And it rips the skin off the inside of your mouth.”

—Dom Hale