I’m totally killing your vibes by Ahren Warner Bloodaxe Books

I’m totally killing your vibes is one-part phantasmagoria, one-part brutal document, with equal measures of irony and sincerity.

It is a book compulsively drawn to a world in which identity and performance have become indistinguishable, where the squelch and seep of feelings frustrate our safety nets of logic and ethics, and violence and inadequacy are so often the corollaries of love.

I’m totally killing your vibes is a book of poems concerning the exuberant performance, and the manic dissolution, of the self. It moves through the slow, fragmented dissolve of a relationship, via a tableaux vivant of assorted, itinerant characters, and an extended, darkly comic dialogue with the feedback of literary, academic, and everyday life.

A final, long-form prose poem extends the book’s interrogation of consumption as our contemporary mode of self-construction, of masculinity, and of desire.

‘Warner’s verse appears to discuss this collocation of scarified surfaces – their bitty, cracked, granular noise, redolent of industrial disuse, and abuse – with the hygienic space in which art is consumed… this is poetry (it is poetry) of extraordinary poise and power.’ – Vidyan Ravinthiran, The Poetry Review.

‘As I read it I felt I had wandered from a party and stumbled into something vulnerable, something human and real beyond the clinking of glasses and fake laughter. That I had gotten the chance to hide in a closet and listen to a conversation I needed to hear but couldn’t quite access on my own… a conversation between the speaker and the other, and most importantly – a conversation between Mr. Warner and himself. What a strange joy to be invited in.’ – Matthew Dickman, on The sea is spread and cleaved and furled

‘A messy, disturbing triumph in the traditions of Arthur Rimbaud and John Berryman: how Le Bateau ivre or The Dream Songs would read if they’d been written today. It too could be the anthem of a generation.’ – Fiona Sampson, The Guardian, on The sea is spread and cleaved and furled

‘Theatrical, toxic and oddly gorgeous… Warner moves from playful social observation, through reflections on memory and artifice, to a near-Baudelairean spleen, his games with language and ideas as serious in their investigations of the given world as any philosophy.’ – John Burnside, PBS Bulletin

These are not poems for the fainthearted, but they are balanced with a dry wit… an exciting evisceration of our present time. – Kate Noakes, The North

Bloodaxe Books