One Night Stanzas

So, as you probably already know, Read This Press‘ first ever single-poet collection — “You Old Soak” by Chris Lindores — has now gone on sale. I promised you a bit more information about it the other day, now here it is!

About the author.
Chris Lindores is 21 years old, lives in Edinburgh and is currently in his final year of an MA in English Literature at Edinburgh University. He started writing a couple of years ago after taking his first ever creative writing course with TS Eliot Prize shortlisted poet Alan Gillis. Since then he’s been incredibly prolific, producing dozens of fantastic poems and having his work published in Read This, Tontine, The Journal, The Delinquent, Gloom Cupboard and Spark Bright. In late 2008, Chris joined the Read This Magazine editorial team and began reading his work at gigs around the Edinburgh poetry scene. He is a regular performer at Voxbox and is due to read at The Golden Hour in April 2009. He is hoping to begin an MSc in creative writing in September 2009.

About the poems.
Chris’ work chronicles the life and times of a young, frustrated Edinburgh man whose story is beautifully orchestrated. An endless spiral of bars, bathrooms, late nights, strip joints, romantic encounters and strange experiences, You Old Soak is surreal, dark, dirty, self-aware, and full of brilliant lines. The opening poem, unapologetically titled “Flaccid Pish”, draws the reader in with the lines “if this place had a bar / I’d have been here before.” This is Chris’ sad, smart, world-weary voice. Get used to it: it’ll be guiding you through his personal world for a full forty pages.
You Old Soak’s first section, “Once More With Feeling,” is a selection of his short, sharp poems: haikus, two-line puns and plays. They start out innocent and funny: in places almost cringeworthily so (”they wanted a huge profit / I got them Buddha” – Business Management) …but as these small poems slide by they become darker, deeper, cleverer. By the time you get to the first full-length poem in the pamphlet’s second section, “It’s well dodgy round here,” I defy you not to be smiling a slightly unsettled smile.
Chris does nothing to comfort you as you turn the pages. In “The Screw also Rises,” he illustrates the general feeling you may well have while reading this book: “hanging from the lampposts / we look down / bemused and disturbed / in equal measure.” There is plenty to laugh at, plenty to wonder at. “Please Sir, can I have anything at all?” (one of the collection’s strongest pieces) tours magnificently the mindset of ‘the youth of today’, while “Been drinking since four in the afternoon” is bizarrely celebratory and strangely prophetic: “‘Missing also’ written up my arm three times / along with the score of coin flips / deciding where we’re going.” Elsewhere though, there is plenty to dismay you. “The Pubic Triangle” is almost Larkinesque in its Britishness, its bleakness (”Dickhead men / roaring / vomiting / feral in shirts”), and in “Meeks or Spinks”, the quiet, almost willing acceptance of death by lung cancer is painfully poetic: “blast smoke through bared teeth, long, lurid and fine.” At times the juxtaposition of sad and desperate, drunk and devil-may-care is hard to keep up with, but the poems are always steadied by Chris’ quiet humour and honesty, his warm and consistently genuine voice. You’ll laugh, you’ll cry, you might cringe and you’ll probably think “dammit, I wish I’d thought of that,” but by the end of it, you’ll come away thinking you might like to buy Chris Lindores a pint sometime.

Why Read This?
I first became aware of Chris’ poetry when he sent me four pieces — a couple of which made it into the collection — for consideration in Read This Magazine. I was instantly enamoured with his sweet, dark, cheeky tone and started following his poetic process via his deviantART page. Realising we shared a passion for Beat Literature, we met up one sunny, windy day to exchange books. The rest is history: we talked poetry in the pub, I encouraged Chris to start doing readings and trying to get his work published, and then when a space needed to be filled on the Read This Magazine team, he seemed to fill the gap perfectly. In late 2008, Chris started talking about self-publishing a chapbook, and I wouldn’t hear of it: I liked this stuff too much. I wanted to be involved!
Chris has spent a good while bringing these poems together — this collection includes some of the first pieces he ever wrote, and some he devised especially for inclusion in You Old Soak. Together, we worked on the order, keeping things unpredictable, intriguing and emotionally messy. We also spent a long time working on the “look” of this pamphlet, eventually settling on individual, hand-made covers to ensure that every copy if You Old Soak is totally unique. Putting this book together felt nothing at all like work… and reading it feels more like having a good chat with a mildly depressed but achingly funny friend than tackling a poetry collection. This is a special book. Read This.

You can order a copy of You Old Soak by visiting the Read This Etsy Store, or by hitting the button below:

(Photo by Zeus one)