Publish 'Stay Awhile', by Lydia Unsworth

Knives Forks and Spoons Press is seeking £500 towards the costs of publishing Stay Awhile, by Lydia Unsworth (featuring The Last Landmark by Jen Orpin as the cover image). We thank you for your support.

ABOUT THE BOOK

Sunderland, Blackburn, Morecambe, Warrington, Runcorn, Middlesborough, Halifax, Crewe, Southport, Blackpool, Manchester, Stockton, Swansea, Birmingham, Wigan, Leeds. Who decides what beauty is? What landscapes should be loved and nurtured? In a series of journeys by foot, bus, and train, Stay Awhile attempts to navigate the post-industrial urban environment and its effect on public and private memories and emotions. The poems in this collection constellate ideas of persistence, obsolescence, neglect and decay, calling into question the socio-political forces that engineer our landscapes, while at the same time celebrating the details of the structures that have been left to us and seeking care and kindness among the spoils.

ENDORSEMENTS FOR THE PROJECT

“I loved this series of short encounters between buildings, people, politics, class and money, and the accounts here of how built structures arrange our emotional lives. Alternating between melancholy and awe, the language is curt but complex, the tone is elegiac but never sentimental, angry without being hectoring – intimate and monumental.”

“Stay Awhile begins with the following provocation: ‘It’s like, you built this. You don’t just get to say I quit and start again’. In which context the title might be read as an invitation, a dare, or as a powerful injunction. It also proposes a model of reading: a deep, sustained attention that is seldom afforded to working-class spaces. Or, for that matter, to their inhabitants. To read is to cross a threshold, to enter and to navigate the structures – architectural, social, and linguistic – that neoliberal culture would infinitely prefer to forget, or to ‘quit’.

Unsworth is a poet admirably without quit; a superb noticer in urgent and sensitised communion with her environment. What these poems demand and make possible is a form of renewed vigilance, a looking at that begins in both language and the built environment and is alert, alive and open in every way that counts. These are generous and attentive poems, full of anger but equally full of wit and humour.

What I treasure most about these poems is their savvy mapping of the interaction between (personal, ephemeral) memory and (public, authoritative) History. In Stay Awhile the former may burst in unruly anamnesis at any moment through the smoothly gentrified skin of the latter, contesting space, refusing shame, impossible to ignore.”

“Construction and demolition. Substance and artifice. How do people and places become neglected and how can we dwell in broken infrastructure projects of the heart, body and city. An aesthetics of disappointment engaging with postwar modern and brutalist spaces in England and Europe, Stay Awhile is tender, funny and forthright in its demands for care.”

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Lydia Unsworth is a poet based in Greater Manchester, whose recent books include Arthropod (Death of Workers Whilst Building Skyscrapers), Mortar (Osmosis), Gag (above / ground) and cement, terraces (Red Ceilings). Her work has appeared in many journals and anthologies including And Other Poems, Bath Magg, Banshee, Blackbox Manifold, The Interpreter’s House, Oxford Poetry, SPAM, and Shearsman Magazine. She is currently studying for a PhD in Manchester, exploring kinship with disappearing post-industrial architecture.