Overview
“This is simply extraordinary writing, laced with wonder and devastation…” Joanna Klink
A sequel to her T. S. Eliot Prize shortlisted Erato, Deryn Rees-Jones’ remarkable new collection sees her returning to ongoing preoccupations: the complexities of memory and memorialisation, desire and the body, and poetry’s place in a hostile world.
The book begins with a woman checking into Hôtel Amour, a space both real and imagined, in the heart of Paris. This is a hallucinatory city where surreal symbols loom large: the hotel’s pink neon sign, elephants, doubles, and lost pairings. A bloody heart lies in the street, books concertina into song, and everywhere is the ever-present noise of birds.
Playful, and moving by turn, Hôtel Amour experiments with fragmented narrative and poetic form, creating a breathing space for a multilayered and powerful meditation on illness, love and time. Hôtel Amour’s fierce and formidable exploration of ‘the now’ and its many ghostly literary pasts, is the work of a poet at the height of her powers as she asks us to listen, and explore our human capacity for transformation and for hope.
- | Author: Deryn Rees-Jones
- | Publisher: Poetry Wales Press
- | Publication Date: Jul 07, 2025
- | Number of Pages:
- | Language:
- | Binding: Paperback / softback
- | ISBN-13: 9781781727843
- | ISBN-10: 1781727848