Will Harris for Brother Poem

Will Harris is a London-based writer. His debut poetry book, RENDANG, won the Forward Prize for Best First Collection and was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize. His poems and essays have appeared in the New Republic, Poets & Writers, SPAM, the TLS, and Granta. He co-leads the Southbank Poetry Collective with Vanessa Kisuule, and works in extra care homes in Tower Hamlets as an activity worker. He is a visiting poetry fellow at UEA developing a new community-led archive of four poets' work.

Will joins us in the bookshop alongside his co-leader of the Southbank Poetry Collective Vanessa Kisuule for an insightful discussion and poetry reading.

At the heart of Brother Poem is a sequence addressed to a fictional brother. Through these fragments, Will Harris attempts to reckon with the past while mourning what never existed. The text moves, cloud-like, through states of consciousness, beings and geographies, to create a moving portrait of contemporary anxieties around language and the need to communicate.

With pronominal shifts, broken dialogisms, and obsessive feedback loops, it reflects on the fictions we tell ourselves, and in our attempts to live up to the demands of others. From a dimension uncannily like our own, intuited through signs, whispers, and glitches, Brother Poem is shadowed by the loss of what can't be seen. Telling stories of bizarre familial reckonings and difficult relationships, about love and living with others, it is a deeply sensitive coming-of-age poetics.