The sea is spread and cleaved and furled

​

(London: Prototype, 2020)

​

The brilliant writer and artist Ahren Warner makes a welcome return with this verse sequence ... a messy, disturbing triumph in the traditions of Arthur Rimbaud and John Berryman: how Le bateau ivre or The Dream Songs would read if they’d been written today. It too could be the anthem of a generation. 

​

– Fiona Sampson, The Guardian

​​​

​

[Publisher's text]

​​

​

The sea is spread and cleaved and furled is an interdisciplinary book and film-work by poet and artist Ahren Warner. It is a sequence of lyric poems, a narrative, voice-over and compendium of notes-to-the-self.

​

Written and filmed across thirteen countries, from the Greek Islands to South East Asia to the Black Sea, the Balkans and the Baltic, it is at once a travelogue and an exploration of stagnating memory, of mental fracturing and its corollary: the exuberant performance of the self.

​

It is at once a love poem, an intermedia obsession with *cats*, and the personal and philosophical exploration of alienation, moving from Andrew Marvell to Cardi B, from Foucault and Back to the Futureto the inane and repetitive close reading of Drake.

​

The sea is spread and cleaved and furled is a poem and a film about the veneer of dialogue, narcissism and pleasure, about contemporary economies of capital, human movement and desire, and the resistance of the sensible or affective world to language itself.

​

With an introduction by Vahni Capildeo.

​​

​

For more information, and to read an extract, please click here.

​

​