Released June 30th, 2024 // 38 pages // 978-1-916938-26-7 // RRP: £8.99
Tonight I Want to Live and, the debut pamphlet from Ryan Norman, explores how we might know ourselves through the violence of sport. From the brutality of boxing to the repetition of swimming, he seeks to examine the connection between the physicality of these activities and their capacity to shape our identities. Norman also attempts to understand the body’s place in the natural world, how we connect with our own bodies and with those of others, and how the body can be a site of pain and sacrament. This is a collection where we can learn to see what we have not seen and to feel what we have not felt.
PRAISE for Tonight I Want to Live and:
The poems in Tonight I Want to Live and take the full range of that open-ended conjunction – they play with possibility and place, from the body to the spiritual, the gym to the garden, where hornets make a nest. Norman writes, in one poem, that ‘My thoughts are trapped // like water in stone’. This pamphlet is a wonderful well-spring, tapped; full of dams and tributaries and sudden, brilliant flourishings.
— Seán Hewitt
This pamphlet offers an intense search for meaning in the boxing gym and beyond, delving into the rituals, repetitions and sheer hard work it takes to truly meet ‘the body and the flower within that body’. Whether contemplating physical or emotional pain, solitude or relationship, the things of the world or what we do to our own and others’ bodies, these deeply thoughtful poems invite us to join them in their meditations.
— Meryl Pugh
Sometimes you come across poems which seem to open up a brand-new, undefiled territory. It’s the very distinct world that the poems in this pamphlet emerge from that gives them their freshness. The body training, the built body as an extension of the self, the damaged body, the body boxing; and alongside all of that, a powerful depiction of the body as the home of the isolated inwardly searching voice of the poems. There’s a peculiar intimacy here, as well as an unusual combination of machismo and sensitivity. These poems come at you from a completely unexpected angle, like a disguised punch.
— Mark Waldron
Ryan Norman’s poems initially read as if they are about the body – and the way that they communicate physical pain lands like a punch – but what’s most impressive about this pamphlet debut is how the life of the senses in these poems is also the life of the mind, and what I admire most is how these poems speak to us, very affectingly, about the mind, about loneliness and about fellow feeling. This is auspicious work and an achievement on its own terms.
— John McAuliffe
ABOUT Ryan Norman:
Ryan Norman is a writer from Beverley. His work has appeared in The Rialto, bath magg, Poetry Wales, and elsewhere. In 2019, he received an MA in Creative Writing Poetry from UEA. He works as an editor in London.
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