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Privacy

Justin Quinn

Cover Picture of Privacy
Imprint: Carcanet Poetry
Publisher: Carcanet Press
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  • Then in the middle of it all
    I woke to find myself in a deep forest?

    from 'Epic Fragment'

    A new life begins. You are lifted five floors into the air, out of your country and your past. You step into a vacant apartment. The walls are white. The view from the window is a forest of other tower-blocks.

    The first few months you buy things such as spatulas, mirrors, washing machines. Men call at the door tugging huge cardboard boxes. Stripping away blocks of Styrofoam and plastic wrapping, you discover a domestic appliance, marvellous, magical. A demiurge, you weld together a world from such deliberate debris, a world suspended at the whim of the turbulent air.

    Memories, anxieties, headlines, dreams flash into your privacy and insist that you make sense of them. Sometimes it feels as though the walls will give under the strain. They do. In the flourish of a pen or the sweep of a cursor, you vanish. You're someone, somewhere, else. A breath. A cloud.
    Justin Quinn was born in Dublin in 1968 and now lives in Prague, where he works at the Charles University. He was a founding editor of the Irish poetry magazine Metre and has published three collections of poetry. In 2005, he published a study of 20th-century American poetry and in 2008 ... read more
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