Poetry English Language

If All the World and Love Were Young

Stephen Sexton

2019 Penguin

Don’t fall straight away to writing your first idea: trouble its journey from imagination to pen. Send away that idea, that impulse, whatever has pricked or moved you. Send it outside, to the next town over; have it marry and divorce. Twice. Have it be bereaved and bewildered and storied, have someone else imagine it. Then beckon it back, costumed and masked, and barely recognisable, except for that first pang of something. Write the idea then, beyond the adverse; graceful and transformed by all that new history.

— Stephen Sexton

Listen on RadioMoLI
Interview with Stephen Sexton

If All the World and Love Were Young

Stephen Sexton

2019 Penguin

Don’t fall straight away to writing your first idea: trouble its journey from imagination to pen. Send away that idea, that impulse, whatever has pricked or moved you. Send it outside, to the next town over; have it marry and divorce. Twice. Have it be bereaved and bewildered and storied, have someone else imagine it. Then beckon it back, costumed and masked, and barely recognisable, except for that first pang of something. Write the idea then, beyond the adverse; graceful and transformed by all that new history.

— Stephen Sexton

Description

When Stephen Sexton was young, video games were a way to slip through the looking glass; to be in two places at once; to be two people at once. In these poems about the death of his mother, this
moving, otherworldly narrative takes us through the levels of Super Mario World, whose flowered
landscapes bleed into our world, and ours, strange with loss, bleed into it. His remarkable debut is a daring exploration of memory, grief and the necessity of the unreal.

On RadioMoLI

Interview with Stephen Sexton

 
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