Chris Emery – författare

Radio Nostalgia examines the borders of war, social exile, and manufactured liberty expressed through corporate media. The poet's world is mediated through news anchors, oracles and heralds, where simulated events are historicised through narrative and consumed as product. Chris Emery's auditory imagination is lurid and comically compelling, with imagery the sets the reader reeling with the terrifying beauty and sinister power of it all."As palliative as a corpse in a junkyard, Radio Nostalgia doesn't relax you so much as it opens a way into wakefulness. With a stunning lexicon, short phrases stuffed with grit, petrol and spleen, Chris Emery orchestrates a complex, resistant music into one to three-beat lines as our 'countdown to armaments'." —Forrest Gander

The Poetry Society 2025 Reading RecommendationsWonder asks how we live with history, with absence, with longing — and how we keep returning to the difficult beauty of the world.In his fifth collection of poems, Chris Emery explores the nature of wonder in its various forms of awe, reflection, and the marvellous. The poems range from the absurd, to the historical, the comic and fantastical – dropping us into stories and places we never quite expect.The collection considers where and how we live: in the city, in the country, on the coast, or elsewhere – and the strange lives we endure in often disparate communities, connected to each other through history and nature, and sometimes separated by it.As with Emery’s previous work, the poems reveal the intimate and fleeting in human experience, and can delve into the mundane, reverie or dreamscape, each lyric serving to illustrate the joy of common experience, all expressed in musical and arresting language that never avoids the freight of emotion.

Dr. Mephisto is in the form of a long sequence of poems. It traces Mephistopheles as he ranges freely through time and space, at times a laconic observer, at others a thuggish participant, but always a presence wherever there is conflict and suffering and whenever there is work to be done. Far from being oppressive, this is an exciting and highly original work, whose exhilarating pace is set by Emery’s innovative use of language and form, and whose acerbic political edge keeps the vision sharp and fresh. Compelling, hard-hitting, and grimly funny, Dr Mephisto will be remembered long after being read, and a significant new poetic voice will have been recognised.

Emery brings an unusually wide-ranging poetic vocabulary to the encounters in Modern Fog, depicting wildlife on the Norfolk Broads or a multi-storey car park with equal fluency. These are elegiac, tough-minded poems of marked originality and scope."It's as if these attentive, atmospheric, musical poems can light up everywhere: seascapes, edgelands, interiors, even a carpark. Chris Emery's art is at once earthy, spiritual, dreamlike and exact. So often, the language is irresistible: 'Above us, in its immaculate empire, / a bird whirrs up and saves / its eyes for the militant hour.'"-Moniza Alvi

Shortlisted for the EDP-Jarrold East Anglian Book AwardsAt the centre of Emery’s third collection are a series of narrative poems that reveal an astonishing range of personas, from the set of Mission Impossible, an extra from Gojira, porn stars, bombers and executioners — even Charles Bukowski turns up to take a leak. There are Pennine journeys, war zones, the Norfolk coast, the Suffolk coast, riots, bad hotel rooms and crazy conventions. Even the secret life of peas. Interspersed among all these are poems concerning the mysterious ‘M’.

Dr. Mephisto is in the form of a long sequence of poems. It traces Mephistopheles as he ranges freely through time and space, at times a laconic observer, at others a thuggish participant, but always a presence wherever there is conflict and suffering and whenever there is work to be done. Far from being oppressive, this is an exciting and highly original work, whose exhilarating pace is set by Emery’s innovative use of language and form, and whose acerbic political edge keeps the vision sharp and fresh. Compelling, hard-hitting, and grimly funny, Dr Mephisto will be remembered long after being read, and a significant new poetic voice will have been recognised.