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
CHRIS EMERY was born in Manchester in 1963 and studied painting and printmaking in Leeds. He is a director of Salt Publishing in Cambridge, England. His work has appeared in numerous journals including The Age, Jacket, Parataxis, Poetry Review, PN Review and Quid. A first full-length collection, Dr. Mephisto, was published by Arc in 2002. A pamphlet, The Cutting Room, was published by Barque in 2000. He was anthologised in New Writing 8 (Vintage, 1999). He lives in Great Wilbraham.