Joy Division inspired photo-poem cards in a bespoke black box. Cards tied with black ribbon with accompanying material on thick brown card on a black foam riser.

Click here to order Strangers Wave for £26 from within the UK

Click here to order Strangers Wave for £31 from outside the UK

Both prices include postage.

“Vik Shirley’s Strangers Wave is an exquisitely funereal black box that brings back the past.

Open the box and there is a set of postcards from the interzone. Untie the ribbon with which they are bound and there are echoes and whispers, dimly-heard voices from the graveyard, the haunted ballroom and the psychic dancehall, the black noise of rain on railway arches and motorway underpasses, a resurrection of twice-dead ghosts speaking in tongues at the coma cinema. These are transmissions from another place, one you may remember, though not from where.”

C.D. Rose

Vik Shirley’s Strangers Wave: Joy Division Photo Poems is a collection that revels gorgeously in the spectral language of fragmentation. Drawing on Ian Curtis’s words from a hypnotic state, Shirley reimagines the “found poem” form of Charles Reznikoff, M. NourbeSe Philip, and others to reveal how poems can haunt both visually and linguistically. Each postcard, consisting of refashioned found language and image, becomes a new type of Objectivist poem for the 21st century. Together, the collection illuminates how Objectivist techniques can collapse time, bringing the language of a lost past into a visual present. Given the source of the words, it’s almost as if the postcards emit a source of sound, lost and found Joy Division notes humming darkly. I’m haunted, beautifully so, by Shirley’s distinctive new collection.

Audrey Golden

“A compressed act of mourning – and resurrection – I find myself moved and unnerved by the poetry Vik Shirley has found in the words of Ian Curtis, and put upon images of a walk through Macclesfield and its cemetery. These disembodied fragments are a haunting – both of Curtis, and by Curtis, of us – an incarnation of the fragility of every single moment we happen to be here on the planet; the tenuous, the ridiculous and sublime; the dark ridiculous gift that is the pleasure of it all, and the pain. It is from a deep generosity that Shirley has allowed us to feel all of this, and more.”

Rishi Dastidar

“Strangers Wave is an elegant box containing haunting and intricate collage photo-poems in postcard form. Vik Shirley skilfully juxtaposes photographs of Macclesfield and its cemetery with fragmented lyrics by Ian Curtis, as a way of producing a pulsating textual meditation with focus on impermanence, regret, and memory. Each card within is spellbinding and revealing: “All cold / All fever / Burning (faintly) / I won’t return”. Shirley’s box of poems is beautifully produced by ZimZalla whose objects always surprise and excite.”

Astra Papachristodoulou