Political theorist and eco-philosopher Stephanie Erev suggests that the material effects of climate change – ‘atmospheric, oceanic, and seismic’ – permeate, and reverberate within, the body, registering only on a subconscious level (2019, 837). It is in this sense that Alex Glynne’s poems explore the ways in which body and self are permeated by the planetary effects of climate breakdown in ways which interrupt the daily consumption of commodities and the complex nexus of feelings that accompanies that consumption.

In Theory of the Lyric, Jonathan Culler describes the lyric as ‘characteristically extravagant, performing unusual speech acts of strange address’ (2015, 212). This is an apt description of Amy Hodder Tempest’s work, where the lyric blocks of text embody a linguistic extravagance that twists and turns through sinuous and disjointed articulations delivered to a variety of addressees, each of which appear both intimate and distant. They are poems that refuse to settle but instead hold multiple vocabularies together in a kinetic tension, where the stream-of-consciousness of the everyday may fold into Shakespearean declaratives. Or where the constellatory coordinates encompass quasi-confessional gameshow dreamscapes, half-remembered intimacies, and encyclopaedic compositions of overwhelm.  

‘The world has lost its capacity to “form a world”’, wrote Jean-Luc Nancy in 2007. ‘It seems only to have gained [the] capacity of proliferating, to the extent of its means, the “unworld”’ (33-4). Globalization – and its ‘indefinite growth of techno-science’, its ‘worsening of inequalities’ and its ‘dissipation of […] certainties, images and identities of what the world was’ – has, he argues, reduced the world to a glomus; a hypersphere or small ball of tissue (33-4). Unlike a world, ‘in which there is space for everyone’, a glomus or glome is a ‘“land of exile” and a “vale of tears”’ (42).

‘Welcome aboard' says the title of the first poem in Andy Spragg's sequence, 'For some there are every / for some there are none'. It's hard to tell whether we are a new worker being welcomed into a corporate department, or whether the mythological Charon himself is greeting us as we board his ferry: something between a party-boat and a funeral barge carrying the dead across the Thames estuary for a chthonic team-building seminar. In either case, the poems deliver their dystopian memoranda in the casual tones of an employee onboarding training exercise. If Hades did corporate away days...

2021: Google – together with Amazon – is selected to provide services for Project Nimbus, a cloud computing project for the Israeli government and its military. February 2025: Google abandons it own 2018 prohibition to use AI in ways that might cause harm, and thus joins a crowded and growing field of AI-focused companies that are increasingly collaborating to shape AI use by the Pentagon. April 2025: Google Cloud quietly announces an AI partnership with the arms manufacturer Lockheed Martin. These are just three indicative nodal points in the wider business strategy that also sees Google pursue contracts with the US Department of Defence, Ice, and local police departments. Those nodal points proliferate to become a phantasmagorical sieve-mesh where internet searches and other algorithmic processes are rarely more than a stone’s throw away from the military industrial complex. Our extremely online lives are at a digital spitting distance from the war machine.

In Sophocles’ tragic play Aias, the Greek hero Ajax gives what is referred to by scholars as the ‘deception speech’. Following the death of Achilles in the Trojan War, Ajax was thought by many to be the rightful heir to his divine armour, but instead, the kings Agamemnon and Menelaus gave it to Odysseus. This snub drives Ajax to murderous revenge although, unbeknownst to him, his vengeance plans are thwarted by the goddess Athena, who fools him into thinking he has killed kings, when in fact he has killed cattle. Labouring under the belief that he has murdered those who have dishonoured him, Ajax’s gives his speech, which deceives listeners into believing he has had a change of heart and accepts the kings’ decision. However, for reasons upon which scholars do not agree, at the end of the speech, Ajax falls upon his own sword, killing himself.

Unlike an elegy – which is a poem memorializing the dead – a requiem is a dirge or solemn chant whose purpose is to call the souls of the dead to rest. Sleep, the term implies (from the Latin for ‘rest’). Your work is now done; it is time to be idle. In this sense, a requiem’s function – if we can say that such things have a function – is to break ties with the dead and with the past they inhabited.