Author(s)/Editor(s): Edmund Hardy
Publisher: Monitor Books
Pages: 36
Dimensions: 134mm x 195mm
Format: Softcover; Saddle-stitched w/ embossed cover.
Year: 2021
‘After reading Edmund’s poetry, I see video-game skylines sinking into one great oceanic filing cabinet; I see friends making snow angels of history; I see cherry blossom petals whipping in the wind to form skeletons, the delicate furious dead all around us. Returning to the poems, I can’t find them now, or, they’ve left. It’s like each poem is a message from the past and from the future, paring in the currents but surviving to reach us, an echo that reaches out a hand against the tide’s pull.
Edmund writes from the interlocking regimes of hatred and violence within which we all live (differently), balancing a conditioning by pain with an inevitability of love. Every Cruel Thing has a boundless capacity for that love; this is poetry which breathes after the kiss (X) of that complex.’
—Nisha Ramayya
‘Hello, it’s been far too long!’
—Laurel Uziell