Caleb Parkin’s debut poetry collection, This
Fruiting Body, plunges us into octopus raves and Sega Megadrive
oceans, in the company of Saab hermit crabs and ASDA pride gnomes. It’s a
playful invitation to a queer ecopoetics that permeates our bodies and speech,
our gardens, homes, and city suburbs. It reintroduces us to a Nature we’ve
dragged up until it’s unrecognisable.
Parkin’s perceptive poetry sparks with neon visuals, engaged
in the joyful, urgent, imagining of alternative realities and new futures. How
might we relate queerly and dearly to our environment and its shared
conundrums? These adventurous poems delight in human and nonhuman intimacies,
teem with life, ponder bug sex and put masculinities under the
microscope. This Fruiting Body roves our grandiloquent planet,
embracing our kinships with matter, culture, creatures and drag-mother Earth
herself.