Makes most poets seem timid and anaemic. Miggy Angel really does not give a fuck about what’s fashionable or critically respected or popular. He’s fiercely himself in every line he writes – James Knight
from Boy, Bestiary
Beat me into heaven on a black and blue train
of pummelling rain and dopamine. I am
deserving. I have done my time in violent
auditoriums. Burgundy scars and beetle
juice tongue. Tell me I’m more than just
your father’s shameful secret. That I’m a perfect
corpse. The favourite occupant of the screaming
midnight ambulance.
Notes on Miggy Angel’s Boy, Bestiary by Robert Frede Kenter
Beautifully written in interconnected sections, this full-length volume of poems and prose poems explores the complex exegesis of steps from childhood to adulthood, from housing estates to the state of the state. Violence is a condition, displacement of communities through gentrification ushers in the venal conditions. From birth to death welcome to England’s dystopian nightmares.
Through deliberative, narrative, lyrical and experimentally sculpted poems, this book is plea and a search. It is unrelentingly hard-hitting and a revolutionarily accelerant. Through its incantatory, mythic and vibrant exculpating of politic and poetic spirit in the broken shards of contemporary England, underlying its ferocity is the critique of the hegemonic of the imperial, colonial, patriarchal. It’s a volume upending unending deadening layers of capitalistic exploitation. It’s spirit is spirited resistance of oppression through fury, rupture, dislocation and recalibration.
Crawl up inside the skin of this lament, in the epic depths of personalities battered by the institutionalization of violence. Exploding the violence of normalcy, the normalcy of violence, whether the lens is honed on family or schools, hospitals, or the destructive effects of gentrification, the effect is interrogative in its lacerations. Taking a wrecking ball and an angular switchblade to the catastrophic nature of misogynistic authority, whether it be fathers or doctors, ring-leaders, sermonizers or TV presenters, this book asks many questions like how does one survive and thrive inside a toxic milieu of media, hidden agendas of crushing institutions that organize society, the cold pallor of the state-corpse.
Miggy’s Boy, Bestiary is nothing short of radiant, a masterful achievement. Writing always at the top of his game, this is a book of ruptures, an indelible blueprint, a bruising imprint of the in-delicate staccato apocalypse, a call that love that demands necessity.
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Miggy Angel is a U.K.-based poet, spoken word artist, visual artist, editor, and founder of Burning House Press. He is a member of the music project We Bleed Ink. Boy, Bestiary is an incendiary book of poems, the third volume of a trilogy that also includes the highly visionary, Extreme Violets (Hi Vis Press).
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