I’m totally killing your vibes
Ahren Warner's latest poetry collection is an incisive, darkly comic look at the tangled web of identity and performance involved in contemporary life.
I’m totally killing your vibes
is a book compulsively drawn to a world where the squelch and seep of feelings frustrate our safety nets of logic and ethics, and violence and inadequacy are so often the consequences of love.
It is a book of poems concerning the exuberant performance, and the manic dissolution, of the self. It moves through the slow, fragmented dissolve of a relationship, via a tableau vivant of assorted, itinerant characters, and an extended, darkly comic dialogue with the feedback of literary, academic, and everyday life. A final, long-form prose poem extends the book’s interrogation of consumption as our contemporary mode of self-construction, of masculinity, and of desire.
Ahren Warner has published three books of poetry with Bloodaxe, including Hello. Your promise has been extracted (2017), which was shortlisted for the Roehampton Poetry Prize 2018. His debut, Confer (2011), was shortlisted for both the Forward Prize for Best First Collection and the Michael Murphy Memorial Prize 2013. His fourth collection, I’m totally killing your vibes, is published by Bloodaxe in 2023. His collections have received three Poetry Book Society Recommendations and awards including an Arts Foundation Fellowship. He works across writing, photography and moving image, with an intermedia project, The sea is spread and cleaved and furled published by Prototype in 2020, and a film – I’m thinking what would sound sincere but also, like, oh, that’s super cute, selected for Bloomberg New Contemporaries (2020).