Atlantic Drift

James Byrne's most recent poetry collection Blood/Sugar, was published by Arc Publications in 2009. Bones Will Crow: 15 Contemporary Burmese Poets, published in June 2012, is co-edited with ko ko thett and is the first anthology of Burmese poetry ever to be published in the West (Arc 2012). Byrne is the editor of The Wolf, an internationally-renowned poetry magazine, which he co-founded in 2002. He won the Treci Trg poetry festival prize in Serbia and his Selected Poems: The Vanishing House was published in Belgrade. He is the co-editor of Voice Recognition: 21 Poets for the 21st Century, an anthology of poets under 35, published by Bloodaxe in 2009. Byrne lives in Liverpool and is a Lecturer in Creative Writing at Edge Hill University. His poems have been translated into several languages including Arabic, Burmese and Chinese and he is the International Editor for Arc Publications.

Wherever your own perspective might lie, reader, you will find that this book contains multitudes. Atlantic Drift is an exciting, important collection, which resists rigidity, bringing together acknowledged late 20th century voices (Jerome Rothenberg, Nathaniel Mackey, M. NourbeSe Philip, Claudia Rankine, Rosemarie Waldrop, Forrest Gander, Lyn Hejinian, Charles Bernstein) as well as some of the most surprising and engaging international voices of my own generation (Valzhyna Mort, S.J Fowler and Bhanu Kapil) this book--in a myriad different, restless waysreminds us, as Julia Kristeva once did, that "the poet wants to make language perceive what it doesn't want to say." - Ilya Kaminsky