The Sun is Open
by Gail McConnell
Description
The central event around which the pages of The Sun is Open cluster is the murder of the author's father by the IRA outside her Belfast home in 1984 – an event approached through a boxed archive of public and private materials related to his life and death. Formally and thematically, the book examines breaks and bonds. Most of the poems are composed as narrow columns of unpunctuated text, their form akin to newspaper strips, and Biblical columns memorised for Sunday School. They include found material – indicated in grey – from newspaper cut-outs, Biblical and literary texts, diaries, Hansard and witness statements. Flitting between a child and adult self, The Sun is Open charts the experience of going through the box, as the poems attempt to decode the past and present, and piece together a history, and a life.
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Rights Information
RIGHTS HELD: World
Endorsements
‘The Sun is Open employs a grammar in which everything is significant, from Wendy Houses, to the very hairs of your head, to the poetry of First Aid instructions, to slaters. This is meticulous and painstaking — sometimes pain-making work — making the words fit the columns, be they inches of newsprint or entries in an Account Book, negotiating or nudging the meanings into alternative senses. A series of ethical considerations and transactions, credits and debits that sometimes demand to be accounted for, or judged, or at least spoken of in the light of whatever the forensics might or might never unfold.’ Ciaran Carson
Author Biography
Gail McConnell is from Belfast and her debut poetry pamphlet is Fourteen (Green Bottle Press, 2018). Her poems have appeared in Blackbox Manifold, PN Review and elsewhere. Gail was co-winner of the Ink Sweat & Tears Pamphlet Competition 2017. In 2019 she published Fothermather, a pamphlet exploring the interaction between parenthood and queerness. Gail is the recipient of two Arts Council of Northern Ireland Awards. She is Lecturer in English at Queen’s University Belfast, where she teaches and writes at the Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry.
Penned in the Margins
Penned in the Margins creates award-winning publications and performances for people who are not afraid to take risks. From modest beginnings as a reading series in a converted railway arch in south London, Penned in the Margins has grown over the last 15 years into an award-winning independent publisher of poetry, fiction, non-fiction and cross genre work. "A marvellously exciting venture, bringing together the worlds of experimentalism and performance, always looking for new ways to present the spoken and written word in a time of artistic flux. The mainstream will, in the future, be redefined and enriched by companies like Penned in the Margins." Ian McMillan, poet and broadcaster
View all titlesBibliographic Information
- Publisher Penned in the Margins
- Publication Date September 2021
- Orginal LanguageEnglish
- ISBN/Identifier 9781908058928
- Publication Country or regionUnited Kingdom
- FormatPaperback
- Primary Price 9.99 GBP
- ReadershipGeneral
- Publish StatusUnpublished
- Original Language TitleEnglish
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