Dr Juha Virtanen, Lecturer in American Literature, has recently published a new collection of poetry entitled Back Channel Apraxia. The majority of the material was written over a two-year period between 2011 and 2013 whilst completing his PhD in English and American Literature at Kent. Juha’s research frequently focuses on contemporary innovative and experimental poetry and this publication represents a unity between both practice and research, a prevalent theme in the School of English. The collection has been published by Contraband Books, a press who have established themselves as “a publisher of new modernist writing, specialising in poetry and prose by the contemporary London avant-garde, and experimental novellas from across the centuries.”
The poet Allen Fisher has described the collection as having “three distinct sections. Some of its Parts, the first, immediately engages the reader through graphic text shifts, interruptions, and at once thought-through and heart-felt resistance to a range of planetary and local conditions. The section is followed by Orathera, a textual immersion in which the verbal DNA sinks in and out of view. The last section, 10,000! yrs, brings a high octane vocabulary, or many vocabularies, wonderful collisions and then openings through constructed clarities. The book has an eloquence that shudders.”
The poet Luke Roberts has also commented that “Back Channel Apraxia is fierce, full of bite.” Back Channel Apraxia is available now from the Contraband Books website.