On the Subject of Fallen Things

'you start every new day with an inventory: a moth, a cape, a parachute, a coffin, a gun, the wall you built to mount the gun.' On the Subject of Fallen Things is an addictive, Chekhovian metanarrative: phenomenological, absurd, and dripping with black humour. James Kearns' speaker keeps company with Lazarus, an inept psychic, and a deceased superhero, but finds himself increasingly alone-lost in dialogue with mortality, both personal and anthropological. Permanence, culpability, the function and corruption of human storytelling: all come into play in a surge of momentum that grips the reader, even as it breaks apart: a lean explosion, a gunshot in the distance. 'On the Subject of Fallen Things weaves whimsy into narrative epiphanies that you never see coming. Each line aggregating weight like the lightness of snowflakes gathering into an avalanche. Hugely enjoyable. Get it now.' Roger Robinson, A Portable Paradise, Winner of the 2019 T.S. Eliot Prize 'This is a really brilliant sequence of poems. Like Ponge, or Herbert, or Steger, or Simic, it manages to be both serious and fleeting, weighty and funny. It's hopeful, actually.' S.J. Fowler, 3:AM Magazine

James Kearns is a poet based in Birmingham and Cape Town. His work focuses on experimentation and collaboration, exploring how poetry interacts with other art forms. He won a Streetcake Magazine Prize for Experimental Writing and his pamphlet After Words featured in Ghost City Press' 2022 Summer Series. On The Subject of Fallen Things is his first collection.