Pretty
Ahren Warner's second collection of poems opens with the sequence Lutece, te amo: a raw paean to the Paris it inhabits that flits between past and present and offers both adoration and horror in equal measure. Elsewhere, London 'licks and laps'; an anonymous man 'works his bones with a micro-plane' and translations of Baudelaire and Kojeve rub shoulders with Kurt Cobain and 'Little Lord Tory-Tit'. More capricious, fleshly and darker than Warner's previous work, Pretty culminates in Nervometer: thirteen poems hovering between a collage, translation and performance of Antonin Artaud's Le Pese-nerfs, which bring Pretty to a beautifully ugly end.
Ahren Warner was born in 1986. His first collection, Confer (Bloodaxe Books, 2011), was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation and was shortlisted for both the Forward Prize for Best First Collection and the Michael Murphy Memorial Prize 2013. He was awarded an Eric Gregory Award in 2010 and an Arts Foundation Fellowship in 2012. His second collection, Pretty (Bloodaxe Books, 2013), was another Poetry Book Society Recommendation. His third collection, Hello. Your promise has been extracted (Bloodaxe Books, 2017) was also a Poetry Book Society Recommendation. He is Poetry Editor of Poetry London and Vice Chancellor's Research Fellow at Loughborough University, and currently lives in London and Paris.
