Francis Jones - STORM DRAIN
Veer2 Publication 043 [ISBN: 978-1-911567-75-2] 13.5x15cms size, Portrait. 72 pages.
February 2025. £8.00 (+ postage and packing)
Francis Jones - STORM DRAIN
'With the vertiginous glitter of sunlit concrete and fluted, addictive syntax, Storm Drain is both a gutter and a fountain for the work-weary and atmospherically-curious dreamers and lovers of this world. The mice and rats of language ecstatically shirk from landlords and bosses in its fugitive waters, and urchins seize the means of daytime as tokens against despair. These are poems dialled into both ancestral impossibility and the magic trick of torquing stolen time and waged nothings into lyric possibility. With lush and attuned dexterity, Francis Jones can swerve from the harmonics of mud and skirting boards at the faint edge of perceptibility, to a heart-in-the-throat directness that continually leaves me in awe.'
- Daisy LaFarge
'Storm Drain just goes and goes and goes and goes. Francis Jones has produced something unrelentingly generous, unhesitatingly devotional –– to language, to friendship, to a furtive liberatory obstinance. This is an irascible lyric that refuses any thoughtlessness: despite or rather because of the blunt and sublimation of wage-work, grief, colonial reverberation. And at the centre? A wavering, exacting body, struck like a tuning fork ... forever curious, sounding. No fixity but the electric clarity of a million indisputable sensations! No surety but the eternal dignity of the working class! This book churns and chokes me. I gag on it, I gag!'
- Hesse K.
'Francis Jones’ poetry captures the imperceptible visions and fleeting qualities of life—those slivers of time lost to the enormity of existence. To read Jones’ work is to inhabit the present, that paradoxical space where faint beauty stands against the relentlessly bleaching force of capital. It evokes a remembrance of times to come, a stance against the dazzling future and all of its potential horrors. Francis Jones wills me to keep existing, to embody my own degeneracy, vulgarity, and fragility as acts of defiance against the many suffocating forces of neofascism. Pride grows within me, echoing from my mind into the world. Each line, each section of this beautiful collection, offers grace—allowing us to feel blessed, to feel loved, and to hold hope for a beautiful, liberated future.'
- Isaac Harris
'With the vertiginous glitter of sunlit concrete and fluted, addictive syntax, Storm Drain is both a gutter and a fountain for the work-weary and atmospherically-curious dreamers and lovers of this world. The mice and rats of language ecstatically shirk from landlords and bosses in its fugitive waters, and urchins seize the means of daytime as tokens against despair. These are poems dialled into both ancestral impossibility and the magic trick of torquing stolen time and waged nothings into lyric possibility. With lush and attuned dexterity, Francis Jones can swerve from the harmonics of mud and skirting boards at the faint edge of perceptibility, to a heart-in-the-throat directness that continually leaves me in awe.'
- Daisy LaFarge
'Storm Drain just goes and goes and goes and goes. Francis Jones has produced something unrelentingly generous, unhesitatingly devotional –– to language, to friendship, to a furtive liberatory obstinance. This is an irascible lyric that refuses any thoughtlessness: despite or rather because of the blunt and sublimation of wage-work, grief, colonial reverberation. And at the centre? A wavering, exacting body, struck like a tuning fork ... forever curious, sounding. No fixity but the electric clarity of a million indisputable sensations! No surety but the eternal dignity of the working class! This book churns and chokes me. I gag on it, I gag!'
- Hesse K.
'Francis Jones’ poetry captures the imperceptible visions and fleeting qualities of life—those slivers of time lost to the enormity of existence. To read Jones’ work is to inhabit the present, that paradoxical space where faint beauty stands against the relentlessly bleaching force of capital. It evokes a remembrance of times to come, a stance against the dazzling future and all of its potential horrors. Francis Jones wills me to keep existing, to embody my own degeneracy, vulgarity, and fragility as acts of defiance against the many suffocating forces of neofascism. Pride grows within me, echoing from my mind into the world. Each line, each section of this beautiful collection, offers grace—allowing us to feel blessed, to feel loved, and to hold hope for a beautiful, liberated future.'
- Isaac Harris
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.