'Debut collection by a young poet whose simple, funny and deceptively naïve poems engage with the virtual realities of the internet.
'The Honeymoon Stage is a collection of poems written for friends on the internet over a five-year period. These friends were spread across the globe, and most of them the poet had never met, and will never know. Poetry was the method by which the correspondents felt they could authenticate themselves to one another, despite their separation in space, and their friendships being mediated through screens. The poems engage with the flattened syntax of internet language, registering its awkwardness while bringing human qualities to the centre of the exchange. They inhabit a surreal world marked by shifting identities and video-clip encounters, blog-like intimacies and strange scraps of information, discovering in this reality new ways of thinking and feeling.' (Publication summary)
Author's note: The I, You and We in these pages do not belong to me, but came to being inside the boundless, invisible space in which we now spend much of our time.
'Confession: I should not have read Michael Farrell’s launch speech for Oscar Schwartz’s The Honeymoon Stage before attempting this review. I had a large attack of Bloom’s anxiety of influence, but I simply couldn’t help myself because I truly appreciate Farrell’s wit and (worldly) wisdom. And now the damage is done. I read the speech and now I’m starting to fear I might be involved in this after all: colluding with, if not an active participant in this – Schwartz’s – whole transcendent digital Otherness that I was previously going to perhaps pooh-pooh just a little in this review. Now I only want to state wholeheartedly that both I and all the online avatars within – without? – thoroughly enjoyed reading The Honeymoon Stage. Meanwhile, I’m left to wonder what there is left to say about the entire identity crisis of this collection, let alone the process of creating a type of posthuman internet-based poetics.' (Introduction)
'Confession: I should not have read Michael Farrell’s launch speech for Oscar Schwartz’s The Honeymoon Stage before attempting this review. I had a large attack of Bloom’s anxiety of influence, but I simply couldn’t help myself because I truly appreciate Farrell’s wit and (worldly) wisdom. And now the damage is done. I read the speech and now I’m starting to fear I might be involved in this after all: colluding with, if not an active participant in this – Schwartz’s – whole transcendent digital Otherness that I was previously going to perhaps pooh-pooh just a little in this review. Now I only want to state wholeheartedly that both I and all the online avatars within – without? – thoroughly enjoyed reading The Honeymoon Stage. Meanwhile, I’m left to wonder what there is left to say about the entire identity crisis of this collection, let alone the process of creating a type of posthuman internet-based poetics.' (Introduction)
