Join a carnival of characters including Bez from Happy Mondays, Jorge Louis Borges, and a medieval pilgrim on a journey to buy a PlayStation, in McCabe’s sixth and most daring collection. Part-written in Scouse dialect and invented languages, Hedonism offsets the comic with the elegiac in a spectral and polyphonic work exploring the intersection of grief, place, memory and imagination.
This is a book where haunted pasts and futures collide; in a post-Brexit landscape, through cities both imagined and real, McCabe’s poems merge through timeslips and ghostly encounters, all the time electrified by the great connector of language at its most radical and unruly. These incandescent poems surge and resist expectation and formula – declaring “can it be, after all, that hedonism is the only activism?”