Misuse

It moves easily around colour, science, botany ... it's a tour de force. My hands itched for the physical touch of it (even if repulsion) ... it's a dance, drawing the reader into these beautiful and sometimes complicated steps. I had to look up words and then sat back and let it all bounce around inside my skull. - Laura Davis In Misuse, Julia Rose Lewis creates a wonderful word world where the reader lives between green and grey, between muses and mouses. In this place where yarn, trees and physics intertwine, naming - of colours, of abstracts, of things - is enacted in a way that is both craftily complex and beautifully beguiling. - Ailsa Holland A quantum meditation that turns personal mythologies into scientific invocations; a visionary field report merging telescopic with microscopic in the impulse to discover what has been felt, and in touching that feeling, what might be created and re-created in the experience. This is uniquely uncompromising, original, and experimental writing brought into the invisible realities of the world and its intimacy. Julia Rose Lewis dissects and conjures language in ways that reveal poetry to itself; a form for the formless forming... how physics and magic swap tricks in the atomic play of meaning. All is chiasmic, alive and honestly unresolved. Poetics becomes a chemistry of embodiment, not a terrain of representation but a flashing of colour that initiates perceptive and sensory communion - and with what? Alongside whales, snails, minerals, dandelions, bears and seaweed, the poems usher attention into its own funhouse mirror: watching the entanglements of perception and sensation as they come into being; they find and lose themselves in the making, just as how we, as readers, find and lose ourselves in the reading. This is above all extraordinary and important writing: brave, bizarre, and deeply committed to its own inventive taxonomy of experience. Reading Misuse is like uncovering a diary that has been written, and rewritten, by the chemical trace and volatile motion of living. Something that we are all a part of and yet rarely have the privilege of seeing. - David Spittle