For all the barbs and deep cuts, Dead Souls is as much a piss-take of Riviere’s career (a decade back, he was viewed as part of a “brat pack” of emerging British poets) as it is a hilarious satire on the controversies that have surrounded “the poetry establishment” over recent years. Riviere is, of course, famously a poet who runs an independent press (If a Leaf Falls Press) and has published numerous collections, including three from Faber & Faber. His shaggy dog tale of a second novel, Dead Souls, is, amongst other things, an evisceration of the poetry industrial complex: the poems, their authors, and the publishers. You’d be forgiven for thinking that Sam Riviere loathes poetry.
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