Sandspout Bookstore

Out West
Simon Collings

£5.00

SIMON COLLINGS is an Oxford-based writer. His poems, stories and essays have appeared in various journals. Out West is his first chapbook.

36pp, C format paperback, card wrapper.
introduction by Luke Kennard
illustrations by Zoë Rubens
cover design by Alexander Walker
ISBN 978 0 9930763 0 5

“What we find in Collings’ Out West is a kind of exploded Western, where generic tropes and the conventional wisdom of common-sense reasoning merge seamlessly with the unexpected and inexplicable… It is solely the marvellous and the imaginary that matters… and this is the real frontier Simon Collings explores.” – LUKE KENNARD

Biography

SIMON COLLINGS is an Oxford-based writer. His poems, stories and essays have appeared in various journals, including The Interpreter’s House, Stride, Tears in the Fence, Brittle Star, PN Review, Journal of Lighthouse, Long Poem Magazine, Poetics Research, New Walk, Ink, Sweat and Tears and East of the Web. Out West is his first chapbook.

ZOË RUBENS is a working artist; she lives in Suffolk. Her work reflects her interest in what both inspires and limits us. She received a first class degree in sculpture from Manchester Metropolitan University. She has exhibited in venues in, among other places, London, Hull, Cambridge, Brighton, Edinburgh, Scandinavia, Canada and Japan.

“The initial (and mandatory) convention flouted when writing a prose poem,” writes Luke Kennard in the book’s introduction, “is that poetry should be defined by line-break. As a reader, when we look at a prose poem, before we even begin to read it, we are instantly faced with a contradiction: typographically, semiotically, this does not look like a poem. There is no line-break and, should we compare one edition of the same prose poem to another, we will find the definition of the printer’s margins is the only thing that dictates the shape of the piece. It is as if, were there books wide enough (as wide as rooms, as wide as streets), a prose poem might be printed as one continuous line. A prose poem is a single line poem; it’s just a very long line.”