This Fruiting Body – Caleb Parkin

Paperback. Nine Arches Press. 2021. New Condition.

Caleb Parkin’s debut poetry collection plunges us into octopus raves and Sega Megadrive oceans, in the company of Saab hermit crabs and Asda pride gnomes. It’s a playful invitation to a queer ecopoetics that permeates our bodies and speech, our gardens, homes and city suburbs. It reintroduces us to a nature we’ve dragged up until it’s unrecognisable.

Parkin’s perceptive poetry sparks with neon visuals, engaged in the joyful, urgent, imagining of alternative realities and new futures. How might we relate queerly and dearly to our environment and it’s shared conundrums? These adventurous poems delight in human and nonhuman intimacies, teem with life, ponder bug sex and put masculinities under the microscope. This Fruiting Body roves our grandiloquent planet, embracing our kinships with matter, culture, creatures and drag mother Earth herself.