You have no normal country to return to

By Tom Sastry

In You have no normal country to return to, Tom Sastry explores questions of national identity and 'the end of history'. A blistering, bleakly funny and timely second poetry collection, following his Seamus Heaney First Collection Prize shortlisted, A Man's House Catches Fire.
By turns crisply satirical and questioning, You have no normal country toreturn to ranges across the legacies of Empire, postwar migration and the current crisis in English identity. Sastry's precise, brilliantly attuned poetry asks how the times we live in and the tales we tell about them affect us; how our emotional landscapes are shaped by national myths and the more personal stories we tell about ourselves. It is a book about illusion, and discovering, again and again, that what was once taken for granted was never really there; a guidebook for an age of "enchantments collapsing on themselves".

• Language: English
• Publisher: Nine Arches Press
• Release date: Apr 21, 2022
• ISBN: 9781913437350

Tom Sastry

Tom Sastry is a poet and spoken word artist. He is based in Bristol which is vulnerable to tidal surges and is unlikely to survive a really serious Puritan revival. He was chosen by Carol Ann Duffy as one of the 2016 Laureate's Choice poets series and his resulting pamphlet Complicity was a Poetry Book Society pamphlet choice.

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