Overview

Alanis Morissette by Jake Wild Hall is a sprawling, tender, and formally inventive collection that weaves fatherhood, friendship, grief, and masculinity into a shifting, polyphonic tapestry. The poems resist singular narrative arcs, instead offering refrains, fragments, and abrupt tonal pivots that echo the dislocation of memory and the loops of online life. Hall balances absurdism and sincerity with remarkable control, moving between the domestic and the digital, the sacred and the profane. What emerges is a lyric mode that is generous, self-questioning, and defiantly alive to the emotional contradictions of contemporary manhood.

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9781917617574

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Reviews

In Alanis Morissette Jake Wild Hall draws us close, into dawn rooms, back rooms, visitors' centres; then back outside onto the block, onto the estate, into a hug. With his bare-wired, hauntological lyrics, where the past is always pressing against the present, Wild Hall places trust in the imagination to revive and revisit, to follow a thought or ache into symbol and song. These poems probe and worry syntax into a frank and absorbing poetic: the humane aftermath of a true heart quickening to life's inclines, and always ready to make more room. - Jack Underwood Jake Wild Hall's voice has a clarity that will break you: warm, sad, and utterly present. This collection is like a late night chat with a close friend that somehow covers 'the classic Cadbury's chocolate bar the Chomp', microplastics in the penis, grief, Grenfell, being 'shit at Fifa', fatherhood, Colleen Hoover, sex and sobriety. I can think of few poets writing better about our times, in which 'the difficulty setting of this game is hope'. - Clare Pollard 'It takes a lot of skill to write poems that appear to have 'written themselves.' Broken forms, snippets of dialogue, pain mosaics - all working for a common purpose, to put the self back together. There's so much love in this collection, fizzling through the electric fence of every line, and line-break; it's painful and beautiful to read. - Caroline Bird These poems touch on remembrance, family, love and understanding. Hall laments the celebratory acts of memory and the unsettling feeling of closure. The notion of making the most of now, is apparent in Alanis Morissette, and the question of what's stopping you? is clear. A welcomed return from Jake Wild Hall. - Yomi Ṣode

Author Information

Jake Wild Hall is an award-winning poet and one half of Bad Betty Press. He has performed on BBC Radio and at festivals and literary events across the UK. He is a multiple slam champion, and his work has been published in magazines, anthologies, and online journals. He is the author of two pamphlets: Solomon's World, which was longlisted for the Saboteur Award for Best Pamphlet, and Blank.He has worked with partners including Penguin, Apples and Snakes, Writing East Midlands, Derby Poetry Festival, and Pearson. He has also been a guest tutor at Nottingham Trent University, the University of Nottingham, King's College London, the University of Lincoln, and others.This is his debut collection.

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