Matthew Haigh – författare

Longlisted for The Polari First Book Prize 2020Death Magazine is a neutropian vision of our soundbite, snippet-obsessed, digital and print magazine culture. It employs the Dadaist technique of cut-up to produce poems that range from the blackly comic to the surreal, from the nonsensical to the prescient. Many of the poems confine themselves to the precise aesthetics of magazine columns, doing away with line breaks entirely to find new meaning in their Modernist forms. Added to the mix are a range of free verse poems more traditional in form. This monster hybrid of styles, of fact and fiction, aims to replicate the untrustworthy, hyperbolic stream of media that absorbs our lives every day. This radical work creates a futuristic landscape of human emotion as product – a pink, shattered diamond refracting our chaotic times.

A vast system crash in the virus garden. Matthew Haigh’s second collection is a single, electrifying sequence on chronic kidney disease, dialysis, transplant and the body re-entering the world. With the cut-up wit and pop-cultural intensity that made Death Magazine a Polari-longlisted debut – now grafted onto something graver and more interior – God Mode tracks an illness through hospital wards, faux-medical letters, surgical theatres and the haunted spaces of online life. It is a queer survival narrative, a body horror, a prayer book for the age of the algorithm. A book about being saved, and what is lost in the saving.

New poetry by Matthew Haigh, author of Death Magazine (Salt) and Black Jam (Broken Sleep Books). Vampires is a rare book: devastating both for its dazzling linguistic flair, and its moving central story—an elegy to a lost, beloved aunt. Family life bleeds into gothic fantasy, video games and arcade classics, an ode to our beta-version hearts.