Poetry Pamphlet

Smith|Doorstop, July 2020

Paperback, 29 pages

ISBN: 978-1-912196-30-2

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​**Winner of the 2019 New Poets Prize**

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Katabasis means a descent, the sinking of the winds or sun, a military retreat, a trip down into the underworld. This mythopoetic and experimental sequence of poems, texts, and translations forms a bridge between an ancient Sumerian epic, The Descent of Inanna, to contemporary neo-colonial violence as a consequence of military occupation.

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REVIEWS

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'Taking its cue from The Descent of Inanna, this collection is one to be savoured repeatedly.'

Mary Jean Chan, author of Flèche

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'At once spectral and vivid, timeless and current, these broken rhythms and stalled narratives attempt to sift through the wreckage of War, and to argue back to it.'

Will Harris, author of RENDANG

 

'The quiet music of Jay G Ying’s long lines leads gently into the extraordinary: through doorways, into War, among insects, nerved by queer desire.'

Vahni Capildeo, author of Venus as a Bear

 

'The use of long lines, mixing poetry and prose-like structures, gives Ying chance to build a sense of fracture, using images to create dream-like visions and question the aftermath of war and devastation.'

Emma Lee in London Grip

 

'Throughout the pamphlet, the process of naming is important and Ying asks us to consider these names through the pamphlet’s own engagement with ideas of 'freedom', 'justice' and what is 'infinite' and 'enduring'.'

Freya Jackson in The Kindling Journal

 

'By creating a pamphlet which inhabits a borderland between the two forms, Ying has heightened the intensity, invoking a landscape of chaos.'

Isabelle Thompson in Sphinx Reviews

 

'Katabasis is an immense work that can be both complex and varied but also simple and uncompromisingly true.'

Reece Merrifield in Foxtrot Uniform