warm blooded things

Shaun Hill

• Publisher: Nine Arches Press
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781913437213
• eBook ISBN: 9781913437220
• Topic: Literatura
• Subtopic: Poesía

Shaun Hill's debut poetry collection, warm blooded things is a radical and intimate encounter with boyhood, sexuality, and violence, love, desire and solitude. Wandering the nocturnal city streets, through random encounters, co-opting space and capturing conversations in a multitude of voices, this collection evokes alienation whilst longing for tenderness.

Hill's agile poems are alive to fear, loss and danger. The poems also explore a uniquely queer archive of time and place, the legacy of AIDS, and draw strength from giving voice to unheard histories. Seeking sanctuary and alternatives to a capitalist reality, these precise poems gesture towards hope, survival and the necessity to be responsible for one another.

"Shaun Hill is one of my favourite performers, his poems charged with vulnerability and raw intimacy. Now warm blooded things offers us this same tender gift." – Liz Berry

II.

life round here

where the grass is green and the / kids

smoke hash and the teens get / smashed.

where the rent is high and the / people

poor and their washing machines / break.

where the cure for a headache is a / hard

on and the men inside serve / time.

where the gas goes fast and guilt / slow

we live next door to / death.

has it become any easier to love each other?

unzip the door in torchlight

and crawl down next to me.

make a home here in the mud,

temporarily. two voices resting

together like rope. this is what

we remembered and spoke

into words for the first time:

faggot. snapping

like elastic. a boy’s fists.

I need to know I exist.

a pocket of change.

my father’s rage. honestly,

I had to. I wasn’t proud

to love you. but I loved you.

boys like you

your father skinned your head so you wouldn’t remind him

of your mother. hair clings to carpet as if it were feathers

of a broken thing: chin down after finding out it couldn’t fly.

jaw mouthing a pride that matches the red and white flag

of baggy tracksuits they wear. tough meat is preferred here.

and this is why boys like you disappear. but you know this.

teeth meet knuckles in this place. cheek on a chain fence.

glass pebbles in the dirt. you think a smile is just a shape

the moon makes. how quickly you forget how to fidget.

how to stage a hate crime

when he spat in my face and the others

got off the bus to beat me, I got back on.

close the door. please just close the door.

they stood there on the pavement,

laughing at me: poofter on a screen.

I’m sorry. excuse me, can I sit here?

she pulled her coat close. they all did.

turned their heads as if my face

were contagious. they… I…

I closed my eyes. held myself

the whole way, like the last time.

song of the first men

I board a bus to the city beneath

the tunnels under train-lines

pass the chapel of chapped brick

and drop down in the crypt

dig the dirt and deeper through

lose my nails until I find

solid proof that the myths were true

that the men were once alive.

wet-plate process

I.

on the back of a Kingston bus we brush hands below a waistband

and like the rush of blood we rise on a spinning disc in the dark

and in that crease of buckled skin prying eyes cannot distinguish

the leap of dreams bucking high on a spinning disk in the dark

and in the street the suspension of a leaf above a puddle,

moon in a milk bottle as we ride on a spinning disc in the dark

but when we release our fingers tip-toe time into a fugue

and pass the man who tried to capture an image of life

on a spinning disc in the dark, as a spinning disc in the dark.

II.

if love only exists if someone’s saying it’s there

then maybe that’s the point of photography,

how in the room behind an eyelid light can

find a way to develop in the dark: first as

red to a wound, then bruised iris beside it,

the yellow thirst of sleep’s tongue lapping

at a tear-duct, before the heavy fall to all

four feet up in the air, until it’s impossible

to tell or tear the earth from the sky.

III.

aren’t you the man who told me

horses could glide?

their hooves the thumping force

inside a human heart?

I need to believe

your words are more than just

clapped coconut

on a spinning disc...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Epigraph
• maps of light
• I.
• II.
• III.
• Notes
• Acknowledgements and Thanks
• About the author and this book