'The critique of self-absorption, mounted formally in the unpunctuated flow of the poetic voice, is also explored thematically in the transmutation of all forms of movement into opportunities for advantage. In the poem ‘risk’, motion is the archetype of capitalist possibility, but also creates an environment of threat for the expendable subject. By recycling airline instructions the poem first emphasizes the traveller as consumer, but also suggests the ways in which migration itself can be turned to political advantage by elites. Again the materiality of the poem heightens this duality: the “manufacturer’s mask” offers the sustaining oxygen of the market but is out of the reach of its potential wearer.

Once more, neither the experiences of the individual, nor the language used to express them, can be definitively erased: “friend requests anxiety posts horny messages stressed out rants” may appear to be private, but they are in fact memorialized in silicon, merging and multiplying into the uncertain future. Language is thus both expressive of technological inundation and part of its cause. Its accumulation makes reflection more challenging, but offers a rich intertextuality from which these poems of contemporary crisis emerge.'

- Lucy Collins, from ‘Reading Christodoulos Makris’, Irish University Review 49.1

This is part of a new series of Veer Books to be produced and published jointly in the University of Surrey and the CPRC, Birkbeck College.

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