Happiness is the long-anticipated debut collection from Jack Underwood. These bright, beguiling poems worry at the world, surreally exploring the 'reservoir of wrongheaded questions' with which love and death confront us. Readers will meet life's strangeness half-way in poems where a childhood horse and recent lover look through a photo album together; where 'sadness is a yacht . . . an anvil dropped from heaven'; fear for a future child is 'a fizz building in a bad grey egg'; a beef steak is 'a question, hung in itself, about blood', and love is someone 'pausing to move a snail somewhere safer in the rain'. In the unpredictable world of these inventive poems, visualisation becomes an empathetic act, a means of sharing the 'fearful and forgotten things' we lie to ourselves about. Happiness is a collection preoccupied with the ephemerality of happiness itself, at the ever-present possibility of its departure, and the ways we try to grasp and keep hold of it. Self-aware and sad, daring and funny, this is an accomplished and memorable debut from a distinct new voice.

Happiness (Faber Poetry)

Literature & Fiction

Underwood, Jack

Poetry

Faber&Faber

This new book of poems finds fresh ways of navigating a time of continual surprise and uncertainty.\nJack Underwood’s debut collection, Happiness (2015), was celebrated for its unconventional and daring tone: ‘conversational, arresting . . . weird, singular’ (Guardian). Such qualities are on accomplished display in this anticipated new collection, as the poems mature and move on to a wide range of preoccupations, including imminent societal collapse and current riots; the limits of masculinity and complexities of fatherhood; as well as uncanny, often amusing scenarios, such as serving drinks to a gathering of fifteen babies or group kissing in Empathy Class. Throughout, incongruous and domestic subjects re-align in skewed lyrics and thought experiments, all presented with a generosity and tenderness that makes the poet so unmistakable – and indispensable for the strange times in which we live.

A Year in the New Life

Solo for Mascha Voice/Tenuous Rooms 2018

Test Centre

'[A] clever, cosmic, moving and funny parenting physics and poetry adventure . . . It's wonderful' Max Porter via Twitter\n'Clear, nimble and dexterous' Ocean Vuong\n'It's a magical book. An incantation to be fully present, fully concerned, fully alive' Luke Kennard\nIn this highly original book-length lyric essay, a father and poet reflects on how his daughter's birth at a time of great global uncertainty inspired him to rediscover with fresh urgency the importance of language as a realm of 'intimacy, overlap, hope and trust'. Poetry can uniquely offer an understanding of the world which brings its complexity within reach - yet does not seek to reduce or explain that complexity away. Poetry is a form through which we might reckon with this uncertain world, learn to inhabit our precarious life more fluently and, in turn, offer what we learn to our children.\nFrom Joan of Arc to the unfathomable gravity of supermassive black holes, from metaphor to quantum mechanics, Not Even This is a moving, thought-provoking work, full of delights. Jack Underwood is open and attentive to the questions that the world and his daughter continue to present: thrilling, terrifying, fundamental.

Not Even This: Poetry, parenthood and living uncertainly

Biographies & Memoirs

Arts & Literature

Corsair

The White Review No. 29 features interviews with poet Fanny Howe, novelist and memoirist Scholastique Mukasonga and artist Ingrid Pollard, who also provides the issue's cover. We present new fiction by Booker Prize-shortlisted author of Real Life Brandon Taylor, Ilya Leutin (tr. Anna Aslanyan) and Elizabeth O'Connor, whose story 'Woman With a White Pekingese' is the winner of the White Review Short Story Prize 2020. Emily Berry's essay 'The Secret Country of Her Mind' is a polyvocal account of agoraphobia in dialogue with photographer Jacqui Kenny; Caleb Azumah Nelson's 'On Solace' explores languages of mourning and expressions of community, while Victoria Adukwei Bulley's 'On Water' traverses global colonial history, seeking new forms of kinship as she investigates her own lineage. Poetry series are contributed by Laura Elliott, Jennifer Lee Tsai and Jack Underwood, while series of artworks are presented from Adam Pendleton and Hervé Guibert.

The White Review No.29 (White Review, 29)

Berry, Emily

O'Connor, Elizabeth

Taylor, Brandon

ELLIOTT, LAURA

Azumah Nelson, Caleb

Adukwei Bulley, Victoria

Leutin, Ilya

Lee Tsai, Jennifer

Arts & Photography

Fitzcarraldo Editions

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Underwood, Jack. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Underwood, Jack