Released 30th April, 2024 // 978-1-916938-13-7 // 60 pages // RRP £9.99
Stu Watson’s latest collection spans the personal and the global. Fersehturm Berlin is as much a record of the author’s experience as it is a cultural document, in which the poems both enact and record the processes of history, memory and technology. With deft use of form and language, Watson’s poetry captures our current moment with subtlety, compassion and acuity. This is a timely and essential book which address the world, its stories, its language, and its conflicts, both micro and macro, real and imagined. But it is also an extended act of witness, a record of how things have been and what they are now, an extraordinary testament to how we process the past and are haunted by the stories we tell ourselves and others.
PRAISE for Fersehturm Berlin:
In Fersehturm Berlin, Stu Watson, mediumistically summons the formal ghost of Stéphane Mallarmé, with throws of a loaded 20-sided die. Words and phrases dance across the page, pop into huge, percussive font sizes, shrink tiny and intense, are channeled into regular prose forms. With a flair for irony (Ashbery and Morrissey are sampled here, among ancestors), Watson suspends disbelief in the face of historical catastrophes and wonders (Apollo 11's footprints on the moon, the Shroud of Turin, Princess Diana's obliteration)—and the rabbit holes and popular myths they engender. This is multifaceted, copious poetry blending succinct narration of world history with autobiographical tales and ruminations render poignant Watson's wide-ranging citations of before-time nuggets: skepticism lives in people born / long after these events occurred. Watson's gift is a clear, generous, humorous gaze. Here is courage for past, present, and future encounters, legends, wonders, heartaches. Listen and learn.
— Chris Hosea, author of Put Your Hands In and Double Zero
With Mallarméan playfulness and intensity, Stu Watson turns the page into an interface in his latest book of poetry. Fersehturm Berlin interrogates casualties of Cold War geopolitical programs, royal conspiracies, the expectations of the past, and unrealized intimacies, becoming, like its title, both latent transmission and material testament of underdevelopment. “Impossible to shake the memory / of how we felt about what might yet be,” Watson writes. With telescopic erudition and disarming vulnerability, he exhumes buried truths both private and public in this new vision or version of a speculative poetics.
— Chris Campanioni, author of Windows 85 and A and B and Also Nothing
Nothing’s back, baby — yes, the anxious vacuity of Seinfeld and yes the zeros haunting binary code, but most of all the absence that is full of all that surrounds it, the impossible compulsory emptiness out of which, Stu Watson reminds us, each consciousness bursts forth. Martin Luther’s, Sting’s, even — maybe — that of the fourth-tallest free-standing structure in Europe. But how much of the chrysalis remains? Across his second collection, with open heart and ferocious mind, Watson recovers much of the nothing that we have done, and which we inherited from the violent nothings of horrible, humiliating twentieth century: ‘battering our way through above / the old dead doldrums that here rule’.
— David B. Hobbs, Editor of 21 Poems by George Oppen
ABOUT Stu Watson:
Stu Watson is a writer and artist who lives in Brooklyn, New York. A founder and editor of the literary journal Prelude, he teaches at Fordham University.
