Blue Eyes by Simon Collings. Prose poem sequence in a colour swatch-style book. GF Smith 540gsm dark blue cover with silver foiling. Vanguard 290gsm light blue interior. Drilled and bound with silver paper screw. Bespoke, handmade by Phoenix Press, Sale, Cheshire.
Somewhere in South America an armadillo and a tapir strike up an unlikely relationship. While they wait out periods of extreme heat and torrential rain they play word games, discuss shoes, and consider moving to Norway. ‘If I could be born again,’ said the armadillo, ‘I’d like to come back as a rock. If I was something igneous I could be around for quite a while.’ ‘But inert,’ the tapir said. ‘I might have some sort of consciousness. Rocks may be thinking, for all we know, only very slowly. After all they have plenty of time.’ Blue Eyes is playful, absurd, but with a darker side.
Read more about Blue Eyes on Simon’s website here.
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Simon Collings lives in Oxford, UK. His poetry, short fiction, translations, reviews and essays have appeared in a wide range of magazines including Stride, Fortnightly Review, Café Irreal, Litter, International Times, Junction Box, The Long Poem Magazine, Ink, Sweat & Tears, Mercurious and Journal of British and Irish Innovative Poetry. A collection of his prose poems and short fiction, Why are you here?, was published by The Fortnightly Review in November 2020. He is a contributing editor at The Fortnightly Review, where he recently published Some Guts, a prose sequence with collages by John Goodby. Blue Eyes, Zimzalla, Spring 2024, is his fourth chapbook. More information at: https://simoncollings.wordpress.com/
zimzalla.co.uk 