• Skip to main content
  • Skip to footer

Cinnamon Press

Small miracles from distinctive voices

  • Home
    • About
    • Submissions to Cinnamon Press
    • Staying Safe Statement
    • Privacy Policy
    • Terms & Conditions
  • Books
    • Poetry
    • Fiction
    • Creative non-fiction
    • Kith Review
    • Cinnamon Subscribers
    • Featured
    • eBooks
      • Ebook downloads
    • Our imprints
      • Liquorice Fish Books
      • Down Deep Books
        • DDB Publications
      • Leaf by Leaf
        • Leaf by Leaf Books
  • Events
    • Launches
  • Publish
  • Literary Awards
    • Poetry Pamphlet Award 2023
      • Poetry pamphlets past winners
    • Literature Award 2022
  • Mentoring
    • Mentoring application
    • Cinnamon Pencil Terms & Conditions
  • Courses
  • Cinnamon Blog
  • Shop
    • Basket
    • My account

Exploring Rights

Exploring Rights — Edward Ragg
ISBN: 9781788640732
£9.99

 

Edward Ragg’s debut collection, A Force That Takes (2013), won the 2012 Cinnamon Press Poetry Award. His second volume, Holding Unfailing (2017), charted the transformations of a resurgent mainland China. Exploring Rights strikes new ground, exploratory and questioning of our roles and ethical choices, in a poetry that defiantly and playfully confronts ‘post-truth’ culture and the prospects of humankind’s survival.

 

 

 

The Price of Convenience

A crisp minus eight this Beijing morning,
changing lanes tattooed with skid marks
that paint an oily patina on subversive terrain.

Pavement fragments under girths
of idling concrete trucks. Everything
sits on the precipice of buckling

under its own pretext, steam billowing
from manholes that dot the lie of this
construction site’s unimaginable depths.

I touch the accelerator and the obedient
bonnet speeds off assuming car-shaped
jets of a unique vapour. As if I really was

the first aviator, falling in love with clouds.
Recalling all the air miles and flights
I’ve actually survived… And who is

funding this extravagance you,
rightly, ask? The giants of literature.

Pausing to reflect on a commuter’s life
and where the last fifteen years
irrevocably went behind the wheel.

Conceiving the life-toppling absurdity
of reciting this poem’s first steps sifted
from streets flecked with carbon-fibre and spit.

The price of convenience is detection,
the analyst said and is correct, since,
now we’ve gone and written down

the whole sorry story, a confessional
of unimaginable subterranean depths,
smarting at the latest linguistic shift

when the news anchors joined
the military by identifying assets
on the ground, aerial or maritime,

now I have returned to the correct exit,
aligning myself with precision and grace,
what is this, conveniently, if not a final word?

This is a complex and intently-reasoned collection which addresses historic and contemporary issues with unflinching attention. There is mordant wit, formidable energy, and a relish for analysis of various appetites. A prevailing and chilling concentration is sustained throughout. These poems witness the urgency of recording and understanding our past and present human darknesses.

Penelope Shuttle

Exploring Rights could not be more timely but is not only that: this book has the sustaining resonance of true works of art. This is formidably intelligent yet also tender and approachable poetry — a poetry of care, linguistic brio, philosophical range, sharp assessment, and occasionally savage indignation. Ragg modulates expertly between dispassionate attention and impassioned song. In Ragg — an Auden for our moment — delicate lyricism and discursive command co-exist. Exploring Rights registers our modernity and its human (and more-than-human) challenges, from Europe to China to the US to the Arctic. Ragg is a varied maker — a wizard of sampled documents, archival materials, legalese, spam, bots. Ranging from Catullus to Himmler to our era of surveillance, Ragg’s many-tongued verse shimmers with a complex intellectual and sensual music. Ragg tests his art on the most difficult yet urgent question: how and whether to pursue ‘the luxury of the poem’ in these days.

Maureen N. McLane

Author biography

Edward Ragg was born in Stockton-on-Tees in 1976 and since 2007 has lived in Beijing. He was a joint-winner of the 2012 Cinnamon Press Poetry Award and A Force That Takes was his first collection, followed by Holding Unfailing. His poems have appeared in numerous international magazines and anthologies, including the 2014 Forward Book of Poetry (Faber & Faber, 2013), Lung Jazz: Young British Poets for Oxfam (Eyewear Publishing/Cinnamon Press, 2012), Jericho & Other Stories & Poems (Cinnamon Press, 2012) and New Poetries IV (Carcanet, 2007). He is also the author of a number of critical works and articles on wine. Edward is the co-founder of Dragon Phoenix Wine Consulting.

His most recent collection is And Then the Rain Came, (Spring 2022).

Maximum quantity exceeded
Minimum purchase amount of 0 is required
Maximum purchase amount of 0 is allowed
9.990

 

Footer

Archives

  • Contact
  • Join our mailing list
  • Impressum

Designed by Cinnamon Press using Copyright © 2023 · Altitude Pro on Genesis Framework · WordPress ·

Cinnamon Press, Office 49019, PO Box 15113, Birmingham, B2 2NJ (please do not send manuscripts to this address. General enquiries are best by email to info [at] cinnamonpress.com) Log in

Manage Cookie Consent
We use the least cookies possible to optimize our website and our service.
Functional Always active
The technical storage or access is strictly necessary for the legitimate purpose of enabling the use of a specific service explicitly requested by the subscriber or user, or for the sole purpose of carrying out the transmission of a communication over an electronic communications network.
Preferences
The technical storage or access is necessary for the legitimate purpose of storing preferences that are not requested by the subscriber or user.
Statistics
The technical storage or access that is used exclusively for statistical purposes. The technical storage or access that is used exclusively for anonymous statistical purposes. Without a subpoena, voluntary compliance on the part of your Internet Service Provider, or additional records from a third party, information stored or retrieved for this purpose alone cannot usually be used to identify you.
Marketing
The technical storage or access is required to create user profiles to send advertising, or to track the user on a website or across several websites for similar marketing purposes.
Manage options Manage services Manage vendors Read more about these purposes
Preferences
{title} {title} {title}
Manage Cookie Consent
We use cookies to optimize our website and our service.
Functional Always active
The technical storage or access is strictly necessary for the legitimate purpose of enabling the use of a specific service explicitly requested by the subscriber or user, or for the sole purpose of carrying out the transmission of a communication over an electronic communications network.
Preferences
The technical storage or access is necessary for the legitimate purpose of storing preferences that are not requested by the subscriber or user.
Statistics
The technical storage or access that is used exclusively for statistical purposes. The technical storage or access that is used exclusively for anonymous statistical purposes. Without a subpoena, voluntary compliance on the part of your Internet Service Provider, or additional records from a third party, information stored or retrieved for this purpose alone cannot usually be used to identify you.
Marketing
The technical storage or access is required to create user profiles to send advertising, or to track the user on a website or across several websites for similar marketing purposes.
Manage options Manage services Manage vendors Read more about these purposes
Preferences
{title} {title} {title}