Plainspeak is the highly anticipated second collection by Astrid Alben, following her
acclaimed debut Ai! Ai! Pianissimo. In these
startling poems, readers will experience Alben’s
unorthodox alter-ego-thinking-out-louder
approach with the same exhilaration as they
might engage with art or jazz. The poems in
Plainspeak deal with place, ancestral ties,
solitude, flight, insomnia and the embattled
absurdities of daily life.
Alben plays with formal boundaries, linguistic
identity and the lyrical poetic voice, writing
with rhythmic vitality and visual imagination.
The poems tell multiple narratives whilst
retaining the freedom of abstraction; they are
supple and precise, each one an installation
evoking different aspects of a particular theme.
Plainspeak reinvents play and logic, is poignant
and humorous, absurd and anguished: a book
for and of the times we live in.