Overground Underground publishes limited edition pamphlets of poetry and visual poetry from some of the most exciting creators working in the literary underground (overground)
OUB 4: The Gospel According to Mr. Eric - Evan Findlay Hay
The Gospel According to Mr. Eric is out now. Purchase HERE
In his decadent and somehow disquieting prose, Evan Findlay Hay conducts a recent social history of Britain, performing the corruption of contemporary politics within language itself. But as the text is warped through gestures of trickery, Hay’s proletariat poetics gives way to something far more essential, a brochure of ‘beautifully simple dénouement’: The Gospel According to Mr. Eric. ‘By mastering basic instructions featured in The Gospel According to Mr. Eric’, vows Hay, ‘one can stealthily become a viral form of abuse in the novel shape of a corporeal rentier. If you can’t beat sinners, join them!’
‘The Gospel According to Mr. Eric testifies the making of histories and myths, both split and spilt across borders of genre and social strata. Yes, something something against totalising narratives something something but also: How do identities congregate around a cause in the first place? What are the textual mechanisms by which this occurs? Evan Findlay Hay is a serious lad.’
—Richard Capener
OUB 3: Recently Attracted Reality Influencers - SJ Fowler
Recently Attracted Reality Influencers is out now. Purchase HERE
SJ Fowler’s new pamphlet Recently Attracted Reality Influencers exhibits the ephemera of the internet through a broken kaleidoscope, disarranging and reappropriating the eerily familiar fragments of digital life in a technicolour hyper-collage quite unlike anything published before.
“If you are looking for poetry of maximum concentration of thought and feeling you won’t find it here. But if, like Wordsworth, you think poetry should be made out of everyday speech — which for Fowler is the automatically generated lingos of the internet — this could be the book you’ve been waiting for”
—Philip Terry
”It’s just meme, meme, meme with Steven J Fowler. Like some svengali of internet trash, here he orchestrates social media mishaps and clickbait into a warped chorus, which simultaneously engages and disassociates in its absurd and mocking warble.” —Vik Shirley
OUB 2: Square Confits - Michelle Lynn Dyrness
Square Confits is out now. Purchase HERE
Michelle Lynn Dyrness' pamphlet 'Square Confits' achieves that most pivotal ambition of art and literature: to reflect the visual-linguistic essence of the mind. Through assemblages of automatism and improvisation, Michelle Lynn Dyrness' collages are like fragments of consciousness on the page, the mind laid bare in all its anxiety and uncanniness; but there is also an enduring whimsicality here, an affirmation of how strange and beautiful it is to exist. Embracing the paradoxes of thought, the sparse language plays like surreal incidental music for scenes of fractured architecture and foliage.
Created over the course of the C-19 pandemic, the book also evokes the sense of a tentative re-emergence into an irreal world. Overground Underground is delighted to publish this entertaining and innovative pamphlet from visual artist Michelle Lynn Dyrness.
OUB 1: Today is a Thursday - Richard Capener / Imogen Reid
Print copies of Today is a Thursday have now sold out. You can view and download a free PDF version below.
In this psychologically charged collaboration inspired by the paintings of Agnes Martin, Richard Capener and Imogen Reid discover a space in which order seems an uncertain state. Reid’s sparse colour and meticulous lines fill the gaps of language, while Capener’s writing — part poetics, part political code — ensures us that nothing in our social or linguistic world is for granted: ‘the structure is not the structure’.
This fractured sequence of drawings and poetry brings together two fascinating creators who collaborate here in unique and unexpected ways. Overground Underground is delighted to publish Richard Capener and Imogen Reid’s Today is a Thursday as our first pamphlet.
