Keri Glastonbury

In 51 Alterities, the author of Newcastle Sonnets returns with a collection that satirically reimagines our era of chaos and chicanery, responding to the persistent threat of economic austerity, and to poetry’s precarious place in a landscape dominated by billionaire tech bros and social media empires.

Once considered a masculine working-class heartland, Newcastle is now acclaimed as one of the top hipster cities of the world. In the sequence of sonnets that compose her homage to Newcastle, Glastonbury celebrates the city’s oddities and contradictions, remixing the material effects of post-industrial gentrification with the vernacular of social media. An antipodean, regional, queering of Ted Berrigan’s New York-based The Sonnets, Glastonbury’s poems embrace the city’s DIY chutzpah and the swipes, likes and filtered screens of internet culture. This is Newcastle in cosplay mode, part eggs benedict, part pebblecrete, where a coal ship named ‘Fiction’ is being towed into the harbour.