THE PARTS OF THE BODY THAT STINK
2024 Launch Tour

Over 30 poets, artists and writers celebrate the theme of smell scent stink for three launches of SJ Fowler’s strange new poetry collection - The Parts of the Body that Stink. Published by brilliant Bristol-based press, Hesterglock, founded by Paul Hawkins, the book will be thrown into the world with events in London, Kingston and Bristol. With readings and art performances on perfume and anti-perfume, with text to textiles, visual poetry to sound poetry, this trio of events will be as eccentric and entertaining as the book itself. Available to purchase here https://hesterglock.net/SJ-Fowler-Stink and more info www.stevenjfowler.com/stink

click the event below to find out more

With Bristol launch July 2024!

“The thing that stinks the most … is you! Or this book. Who cares? That’s not what this is about at all. You stink, I stink, everything worthwhile stinks. Smell it while you can. This is an eccentric poetry book by most standards, divided into five chapters, each a long poem. Nose, pits, feet, anas, genitae. All about how we smell and what that might worry in us. For example, let’s not get obsessed with what we’ll smell of in the grave! After all, you smell right now. Let’s just read, and for one day, not give ourselves a scrubbing.”

From an article by David Spittle on The Parts of the Body That Stink : March 2024

“Extending in a rabid evolution from the momentum of The Great Apes (2022) and into the great stench, Fowler is reimagining the long poem – not as ‘epic’ or in the vainglorious folly of intertextual expanse but in the mischievous flesh and stain of an all too human mess. Using the dare of blunt accident, chance misspellings and grammatical mishap, the poem reveals the performed intelligence of certain poetic traditions (their postured erudition in the airless intellect of self-congratulation) in its, ironically far smarter, force of idiocy. There is a primal and somatic wisdom in the enactment of honest mess. Through and alongside the brute play of unmaking the taste and smell of language, Fowler invokes a truth more sensitive than any crafted position or honed perspective. Poetry with the dignity of refusal, a turning away from any flag-planting absolutes, and away from the hypocritical vantage point of any codified message; it exists to dirty the soapbox of advertised persuasion, to grab for something more vital.

Parts of the Body that Stink is satire expressed in physicality, bursting, in the necessarily strange and splintered wit of language, like a spreading bruise. Not a commentary but a fundamental and rudimentary smear of body-talk. No pirouettes of rehearsed persona or didactic pantomimes of familiar critique – but something more gleefully liberating, something that hits you like a smell, a building pressure that draws us close in the messy digestion of being. For all its churning provocations, this is a poem that celebrates its chaos and, in doing so, becomes a madly compulsive read. Full of upsetting comedy and barbed with volatility, reading becomes a form of sparring: you try to find out where you sit in the text, where the voices are in the text, where voice cannot go but bodily residue continues – that inarticulate eloquence of happening; how the body buckles and, getting up, transcribes its aching gristle. New mess from the swallowed and chewed apart –  a turbulent passage, a wording of gut in the real and corporeal gore of poetry and speech.”