This Fruiting Body

By Caleb Parkin

Caleb Parkin's debut poetry collection, This Fruiting Body, plunges us into octopus raves and Sega Megadrive oceans, in the company of Saab hermit crabs and ASDA pride gnomes. It's a playful invitation to a queer ecopoetics that permeates our bodies and speech, our gardens, homes, and city suburbs. It reintroduces us to a Nature we've dragged up until it's unrecognisable.
Parkin's perceptive poetry sparks with neon visuals, engaged in the joyful, urgent, imagining of alternative realities and new futures. How might we relate queerly and dearly to our environment and its shared conundrums? These adventurous poems delight in human and nonhuman intimacies, teem with life, ponder bug sex and put masculinities under the microscope. This Fruiting Body roves our grandiloquent planet, embracing our kinships with matter, culture, creatures and drag-mother Earth herself.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Nine Arches Press
• Release date: Oct 14, 2021
• ISBN: 9781913437268

Caleb Parkin

Caleb Parkin, Bristol City Poet 2020 - 22, won second prize in the National Poetry Competition 2016, the Winchester Poetry Prize 2017 and other competition shortlists. His poems are published in The Rialto, The Poetry Review, Under the Radar, Poetry Wales, Magma, Butcher’s Dog, Lighthouse and elsewhere. Caleb tutors for Poetry Society, Poetry School, Cheltenham Festivals and First Story and holds an MSc in Creative Writing for Therapeutic Purposes (CWTP). He previously worked in BBC TV and Radio production, as a teacher and Senior Inclusion Worker. He lives in a human-canine pack in suburban Bristol. His debut pamphlet, Wasted Rainbow, was published with tall-lighthouse in February 2021. This Fruiting Body is his debut collection.

Book preview

cover.jpg

This Fruiting Body

img1.jpg

This Fruiting Body

Caleb Parkin

ISBN: 978-1-913437-25-1

eISBN: 978-1-913437-26-8

Copyright © Caleb Parkin, 2021.

Cover artwork: ‘This Fruiting Body’ © Jasmine Ward

All rights reserved. No part of this work may be reproduced, stored or transmitted in any form or by any means, graphic, electronic, recorded or mechanical, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

Caleb Parkin has asserted his right under Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work.

First published October 2021 by:

Nine Arches Press

Unit 14, Sir Frank Whittle Business Centre,

Great Central Way, Rugby.

CV21 3XH

United Kingdom

www.ninearchespress.com

Nine Arches Press is supported using public funding by Arts Council England.

img2.jpg

For all my families

Contents

Young Animal

If the Earth is My Mother

garden

Dear Horticultural Mother-in-law,

The Radio Talks About GDP

How to Preserve a Fatberg

All the chipshops I have ever been to

i swallow

Voice Over: The Carrier Bag

By the Writing Shed at Laugharne

The Zone

Ecco the Dolphin

Great-Great-Grandspider, 2120

Terms of Service: Your Fruiting Body

Ode on a Black Plastic Compost Bin

Tomb Sweeping Day

Winged Insects at Literary Events

Exit Only

Hopper Swiss Collects Waterfalls

from The Mar-a-Lago Resort Website

The Channel

Chromatophores

Minotaur at the Soft Play Centre

I Compare Myself to a GIF of a Dung Beetle

Campers

Watership Down Fugue

The Painted Gate

Eight Kinds of Love

Doghouse

For I Will Consider Gnorma, the Asda Pride Gnome

Doctored-ness

Spiral Shell

Unknown Distance, Moderate Difficulty

Hermit Crab

At the Outdoors Store

The Ballad of the Morris Omies

Witches’ Knickers

Shrinking Violets

Tree Triptych

Stubble

Kind Words About Darkness

Instead of Smoking After Sex

Somewhere to Keep the Rain

After the Section 14

Oberon Avenue

Please Do Not Touch the Walrus or Sit on the Iceberg

Acknowledgements and Notes

Thanks

About the author and this book

…in the face of self-doubt, ridicule, and broader ecological crisis, we embrace our sense of our own absurdity, our uncertainty, our humor, even our perversity.

– Nicole Seymour, Toward an Irreverent Ecocriticism

If anything, life is catastrophic, monstrous, nonholistic, and dislocated, not organic, coherent, or authoritative.

– Timothy Morton, Queer Ecology

There will be no tidying up, dear.

– Mrs Madrigal, in The Days of Anna Madrigal

by Armistead Maupin

Young Animal

Horniman Museum, Summer 2019

A greyhound’s head, its paper-thin fur now even

thinner, wall-mounted next to a bulldog’s jowl, now

static, unwobbly, and a squish-jawed (fixed) Pekingese.

The central wolf’s muzzle is staged in a jaded snarl.

These dogends fan out in a ruff around this Ancient,

the