The Common Press is excited to host the book launch of ‘Mother Night’ by Serge ♆ Neptune on Tuesday June 25th, from 6:30 pm to 9 pm. With readings by Alice Hiller and Peter Thickett.
Mother Night is a hallucinogenic journey across a city with too many alleyways and across a life surviving childhood sexual assault. Forming a nocturnal séance, Serge ♆ Neptune resurrects abusive old lovers and ghosts of the queers of the past – conjures men in cars and men in bedrooms – providing them invitation and shelter, or casting them to stormy waves. In a book of many types of darkness – across poems of vulnerability and harm – what persists in Mother Night is its celebration of resilience, what shines brightest is the many ways it reaches for the light.
‘Holding their spaces open to the unruly, the poems of Mother Night form wryly tender receptacles of the raw, queer experience. Beginning in adversity and challenge, as pills perform a “rose-gold attempt/ to ease/ a sledge-hammer thought”, we are led backwards down through layers of lovers, and predators, to the seven-year-old place where life ends, and then must restart. Creating a language to explore the long aftermath of childhood sexual abuse, Serge ♆ Neptune’s courageous, crucial work is also a song of healing and self-reclamation’ – Alice Hiller
‘Serge ♆ Neptune’s nocturnes and lyrics are audacious, undeniable, and striking. What has scarred the flesh, what has charged the flesh pulses in these poems. The language itself is visceral, deftly wrought. In Mother Night, the body is a constellation of sensations and experiences. This chapbook announces the arrival of an immensely gifted poet.’ – Eduardo C. Corral
About Serge ♆ Neptune
Picture by Sofia Falconi
Serge ♆ Neptune has been called ‘the little merman of British poetry’. He is a Faber Academy alumnus and a queer neuro-divergent poet based in London. His work has been placed in the National Poetry Competition and the Winchester Poetry Competition. Several poems appeared in bath magg, Propel, The North, The Rialto, Banshee, Magma, and elsewhere. His new pamphlet, Mother Night, is out with the Emma Press in 2024.
insta/twitter: @mermanpoet
Website: sergeneptune.co.uk
About Alice Hiller (reading)
Alice hiller’s debut, bird of winter, explores the agency and transformations that art-making can generate. Published by Liverpool University Press, it was short-listed for the 2021 Forwards and 2022 John Pollard prizes. alice was a Forwards judge for 2022. She founded and facilitates the Voicing Our Silences workshop to resource poets responding to complex materials. If you want to know more, find her at https://alicehiller.info/
About Peter Thickett (reading)
Peter is an Arts Council funded poet, cultural strategist and former theatre director living and working in London. His most recent body of work, Sewer Lock, explores the relationship between two anonymous figures living in a dystopian future, where an ambiguous yet clearly catastrophic event has left survivors altered, both physically and mentally. As the collection unfolds, the traditional taxonomies of animal, plant and mineral start to collapse, and we’re left questioning where the body ends and the landscape begins. Poems from the collection have been published in The Poetry Review, Propel, Contralytic and The Hydra Book Club's inaugural journal of art and literature.
- Doors open at 6:30 pm
- Q&A and readings from 7 pm
- Book sales and signings from 8.30pm - 9pm.
- BYOB - There will be hot drinks and non-alcoholic drinks available to buy