POETRY BOOK LAUNCH: JACK BENNETT – LUNETTE

THURSDAY 7 SEPTEMBER / 6–8PM / OPEN EYE GALLERY

FREE, REGISTER HERE

Join us for an evening of poetry with Jack Bennett to celebrate the launch of new publication Lunette, with support from Broken Sleep Books poets James Byrne and Day Mattar.

Jack Bennett is a young poet, short story writer and artist from Cheshire. He is a recent postgraduate with an MA in Creative Writing from Edge Hill University. ‘Lunette’, published by Broken Sleep Books, is Jack’s first publication. It is a collection of surreal and lucid prose poems which feature themes of displacement, flux, purgatory, and the bonds we have with others. Taking place on a narrowboat, the poems move at a canal’s pace, though never stopping, always moving through this familiar, uncanny landscape. The text is paired with Bennett’s own watercolour illustrations, and drawn as if done automatically. The main body of work is accompanied with a lyric essay listing some answers to ‘What is a poem?’.

Praise for Lunette:

A truly captivating tapestry of magnetic episodes, woven with the marvellous, it is both captivating and enthralling, an inhalation of the impossible made possible.

– John Welson, The Dialectical Phoenix

The apprenticeship of the poet is lifelong, but some poets are rare in how they land with a clarity of vision. Jack Bennett is such a poet: lucid, formally and technically capacious and with a curiosity about the world that feels both empathic and limitless. Lunette is an nautical epic, hatched from the egg of a Leviathan, embodying the range of a tiller’s arc. The accompanying plates sit beautifully in dialogue with the texts, Bennett is an artist in the fullest sense. I’ve read no book quite like this and so it begins the publishing life of one of the most impressive new poets I have been fortunate enough to work with.

– James Byrne, Of Breaking Glass

Lunette is £8.99 and is available to buy, amongst many other great publications, at brokensleepbooks.com.

Image: Jack Bennett”