After the Formalities

Anthony Anaxagorou is a British-born Cypriot award-winning poet, fiction writer, essayist, publisher and educator. His poetry and fiction has appeared on BBC Newsnight, BBC Radio 4, ITV, Vice UK, Channel 4 and Sky Arts, and has been published in The Poetry Review, The Feminist Review, Amnesty International’s Words That Burn and John Berger’s The Long White Thread of Words. He won the 2015 Groucho Maverick Award and in 2015 was shortlisted for the Hospital Club’s H-100 Award for most influential people in writing and publishing. He has toured extensively both in Europe and Australia. Anthony is artistic director of Out-Spoken, a poetry and live music night in London, and publisher of Out-Spoken Press.

EndorsementsA burning rage with a delicate taste, Anthony’s words are a puzzle for the mind, a wrench for the heart and a massage for the soul. After the Formalities sees a poet at the peak of his powers, playing with form and style, tone and content, while maintaining a unique voice through a characteristic mix of historical scholarship, and caustic wit.- AkalaAfter the Formalities is a supreme collection. Anaxagorou’s lyrics, mapped over expansive interior and historical landscapes, feels to me as wise and weathered, and it feels to be bringing something totally new to my ear. Solid. The Self and The West catch the hardest blows, but Anaxagorou’ s throws hands critical, bloodied, and tender all so skilfully in this collection you can’t help but come out feeling rocked too. The ghosts that haunt this collection have bless it and we are blessed for it.- Danez SmithThere’s a fresh type of originality in After The Formalities; a book funded by a quiet, yet fierce knowing, that weighs its startling imagery and intuitive language with a depth of risk and vulnerability. Anaxagorou's vocabulary is one which pushes back, moving between socio-symbolic spaces and evolving an empathy and generosity that wasn’t there before, and for this I love him.- Wayne Holloway-SmithAfter the Formalities doesn’t just radically redefine what it means to write about the self in poetry, it forges a space for a brand-new kind of poetics on the subject. Anaxagorou’s philosophic utilization of multiple poetic modes gifts the poems their mastery, and his view on the world and ideas – unsettled, nebulous, nuanced and ambivalent – means these masterful poems can then critique the very form within which they sit, both co-opting and critiquing structures in poetry and the world that subjugate. Formal, experimental, dextrous, aural, democratic, radical; what Anaxagorou does in this collection breaches paraphrase. Mining personal and public history, the importance of this book – for poetry and for how we talk about and know society – cannot be overstated. These poems work as poems should: enacting deep thought towards philosophies, and they make me hopeful.- Rachael Allen