You’re on a long car journey with Thomas Bernhard and Daniil Kharms. Lydia Davis was supposed to come too, but there was an emergency, conveniently. The two dystopian absurdists are fractious, arguing over the distinctions between poetry and prose and whether such distinctions are necessary or even possible. The radio is jammed on Magic FM. It’s not clear who is driving. Someone may have a ventriloquist’s dummy. The road is monotonous, offering no relief until you reach, at last, a service station. You stumble inside to order coffee, but find the café serves only boiled turnip and squirty cream, and the squirty cream has just run out. And who is that you see in the corner at a Formica table, underneath a maddeningly flickering strip light? It’s Vik Shirley. And she’s laughing. Or, at least, she’s certainly amused.
Tom Jenks

“Vik Shirley has fast established herself among our foremost writers of intense, vividly strange comedy and disturbance. The speakers are sometimes stoical, sometimes lost and grief-stricken in the face of a cold and meaningless universe. Like the best Absurdism it unpicks received wisdom and common sense and rattles our certainties with insistent, malevolent glee. The central Death sequence, its formal flourishes perfectly offset against our own mortality, is something I know I’ll be going back to for years. There are several things that set Shirley’s work apart: not least the disarming and unsettlingly plainspoken voices, but ultimately the way a kind of chasm opens in the final lines of each poem, leaving us floating in some new space, as alive and confused as the cast.”
Luke Kennard

The strange, brilliant magic tricks of Vik Shirley’s poems coil us tightly around the most delicious bright rainbow streamers of language and push us into a cavernous sleeve, only to pull us out again to a world that’s suddenly a lot more astounding and surprised. This writing has in spades (or rather tumble dryer drums) what Philip Lamantia called “a touch of the marvellous”. The poems in The Continued Closure of the Blue Door bend and squeeze in experimental and contortionist directions; they go beyond re-enchanting the everyday to actually weird us out of our complacencies. I love this book.
Colin Herd

Available