Megan Fernandes
Organ Speech

A5, 40pp, €5, November 2011
ISBN 979-10-90394-10-0
The cover image is by Joshua Neves and Graham Bury.

It is exciting to discover a new poet and a new press. Megan Fernandes is a sophisticated and sensitive writer, and her poems are, by turn, surprising, vivid and affecting. Organ Speech is unnervingly good. Read more of Charles Whalley’s piece in Sabotage Reviews.

From Megan Fernandes you can learn that language has an energy of its own, much like the (Kinetics) of a pink leaf, running somehow parallel to us, able sometimes to be spooned up & turned over, like the air, or different coloured light, in the hands of only the very carefulest listeners and observers—like Fernandes. You can learn how adjectives are palpable as meat and why young women cheat and about pennies from Yeats’ poems. You can learn what queens do with little boys behind blue-rutted buses; about dinosaurs & neurons and the catastrophe of gestures. You can learn about the soft anger of the poet & certain other overlooked corners of the brain; about movement & food stuffs & ontologies & joy. She can teach you all this. Emily Critchley

Neurons, synapses, matter, planets and energy describe memories and their relation to the present tense. ‘The sounds grows.’ Imagine a poetry that anthropomorphises cellular process, that excavates the operations beneath ontology, which is philosophy, which is a body in motion, sense organs all open: this is that. Organ Speech is provocative, lyrical, suspenseful, exciting, sexy, and full of ideas. TOUCH EVERYTHING Marianne Morris