An elegant reflection on experience and imagination complicates a very familiar figure of speech

Please join us to celebrate the launch of Men of the Same Name by Evan Jones, hosted by Jim Johnstone. The event will feature readings and discussion, and audience members will have the opportunity to ask their own questions. We will show the text during readings so that you can read along. Men of the Same Name is satirical, elegiac and memorable, bringing together lost books, burned libraries, Goethe, the lives and deaths of Presocratic philosophers, Paris, statues of Niobe, patterns in history, war, displacement, the evils of ambition, and Pachynian tuna. What if, Jones asks, instead of using the ancient world as a metaphor for modern life, the poet uses modern life as a metaphor for the ancient world? Working in this way between allegory and reality, the book rethinks poetry’s changing relationships to politics and our historical moment. Registration for this online event will cost £2, redeemable against the cost of the book. You will receive the discount code and instructions for how to purchase the book in your confirmation email as well as during and after the event. Canadian poet Evan Jones [Ευριπίδης Ιωάννου] lives in Manchester. His first collection of poetry, Nothing Fell Today But Rain (2003), was a finalist for the Governor-General’s Literary Award for Poetry. He co-edited Modern Canadian Poets (2010) and has since published Paralogues (2012) and Later Emperors (2020). His translation from the Modern Greek, The Barbarians Arrive Today: Poems and Prose of C.P. Cavafy (2020), was a TLS Book of the Year. Jim Johnstone is a Canadian poet, editor, and critic. He is the author of seven books of poetry, most recently The King of Terrors (Coach House Books, 2023).

So often contemporary poetry is concerned with politics, posturing or posing. Poets long for sympathy for their plight, admiration for their strength or

Circle of light on the village street from his kitchen window where he stands in the slowing breath of nightfall, stares through that cold fire into sifting shadow: dusk-blue snow banked against the p...

Occupations for air A funeral shroud for each forgotten child, strand of frost-flowers across a face, curtain blooming full of the nothing wind is. Air through papers will be gentler than an immigr…

The decommissioning of Heather Benning's artwork The Dollhouse.

YouTube video by The Paris Review

You who wronged a simple man Bursting into laughter at the crime, And kept a pack of fools around you To mix good and evil, to blur the line, Though everyone bowed down before you, Saying virtue and w...