Harry Brooks-Kent - Sick Notes
Veer2 Publication 048 [ISBN: 978-1-911567-81-3] A5 size, Portrait. 84 pages. B&W and Colour. July 2025. £12.00 (+ postage and packing)
Harry Brooks-Kent - Sick Notes
“Brooks-Kent’s Sick Notes are a kaleidoscopic, ouroborotic, entanglement of jagged blades, glitches, scummed membranes and bleeding wounds. Navigating ecologies of necrocapitalism, they traverse embodimindment landscapes hijacked and warped by meaningless work. Tearing shreds from frameworks of wellness and productivity, as well as medical models of mental and physical health, these autophagous poems embody a screaming mouth that carries within itself a thousand more screaming mouths.”
—Nell Perry
“Somewhere in our current waking nightmare, there’s an endless undead ham-mouth ceaselessly repeating the words ‘can’ and ‘work’ and ‘should’, at times followed by other cursed syllables like ‘deep’ and ‘British’ and ‘values.’ Sick Notes, Brooks-Kent’s searing debut collection, is a timely and necessary counterpoint
to that awful ham-mouth, one that works against that present spell of reality to deliver a knotted anti-diagnosis that rings truer than any framework or assessment of wellness could ever dream. It is a poetry that deserves to be printed on every sick note and every automated out of office reply until they jam every inbox, and the ham-mouth speaks no more.”
—Juha Virtanen
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.
“Brooks-Kent’s Sick Notes are a kaleidoscopic, ouroborotic, entanglement of jagged blades, glitches, scummed membranes and bleeding wounds. Navigating ecologies of necrocapitalism, they traverse embodimindment landscapes hijacked and warped by meaningless work. Tearing shreds from frameworks of wellness and productivity, as well as medical models of mental and physical health, these autophagous poems embody a screaming mouth that carries within itself a thousand more screaming mouths.”
—Nell Perry
“Somewhere in our current waking nightmare, there’s an endless undead ham-mouth ceaselessly repeating the words ‘can’ and ‘work’ and ‘should’, at times followed by other cursed syllables like ‘deep’ and ‘British’ and ‘values.’ Sick Notes, Brooks-Kent’s searing debut collection, is a timely and necessary counterpoint
to that awful ham-mouth, one that works against that present spell of reality to deliver a knotted anti-diagnosis that rings truer than any framework or assessment of wellness could ever dream. It is a poetry that deserves to be printed on every sick note and every automated out of office reply until they jam every inbox, and the ham-mouth speaks no more.”
—Juha Virtanen
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.