Federal Gods – Zoom Launch Live @ Cohub Coworking in Eastbourne on 7th June Palewell Press warmly invites you to the online launch of Clare Saponia’s third poetry collection, Federal Gods, on Tuesday, 7th June. This is going to be a Zoom / hybrid event for those who weren’t able to attend the London launch last week
You can make anything by writing.
C.S. Lewis
Clare Saponia is the author of three published poetry collections: Federal Gods (Palewell Press 2022), The Oranges of Revolution (Smokestack Books 2015) and Copyrighting War and other Business Sins (2011) and contributed to various anthologies, including: Smokestack Lightning (Smokestack Books 2022), They want all our teeth to be theirs (Culture Matters 2021), The Cry of the Poor (Culture Matters 2021), The Brown Envelope Book (Caparison Books 2021), Witches, Warriors, Workers (Culture Matters 2020), Kakania – An Anthology (Austrian Cultural Forum 2015), The Robin Hood Book – Verse versus Austerity (Caparison Books 2012), Emergency Verse – Poetry in Defence of the Welfare State (Caparison Books 2011).
You can buy copies of these books by either following the purchase options below, ordering from the publisher or contacting Clare directly for a signed copy.
Clare loves doing readings and collaborating in spoken-word projects. So, if you would like to book her for poetry events, festivals and workshops just get in touch via email or social media.
Federal Gods, is about the challenges facing asylum seekers on arriving in Europe. In 2015, Germany opened its doors to almost 1 million refugees, despite increasingly right-wing opinion being voiced across the continent. People were fleeing war and persecution in various parts of the Middle East, Central Africa and Afghanistan. Economic migrants from the West Balkans and Eastern Europe were escaping corruption. And yet, many countries turned their backs. Federal Gods is the very human sequel to The Oranges of Revolution, exploring the inevitable knock-on effect of civil wars, western intervention and imperialism on civilians, who risked their lives to reach safety in Europe, only to encounter new conflicts on arrival.
Federal Gods documents a series of immigration stories, interactions, harsh socio-political realities and insights the author observed while volunteering at Wilmersdorf Town Hall in Berlin, using her language-training experience as a linguist to teach German to refugees.
‘Federal Gods is an extraordinary account of the Refugee Crisis, recording in furious detail the miserable realities behind the newspaper headlines of people hungry for life, but starved of kindness. Powerful, moving, necessary.’
Andy Croft, Smokestack Books
‘A timely and important book about exile, forced migration and home-making. Intensified by her own experience of displacement in Berlin in the run-up to Brexit, Saponia has masterfully written an account of the 2015-17 refugee crisis in Europe with a voice that is empowering and tender, eloquent and yet deeply faithful to the realities of everyday life in transit.’
Fatemeh Shams, Assistant Professor of Modern Persian Literature, University of Pennsylvania
‘Federal Gods is a document of intense political and poetic commitment. It is also a deeply compassionate work; one that assumes the risks and rewards of vulnerability. Saponia handles her lyric subjects with clarity and genuine tenderness as she negotiates notions of belonging, longing, history, identity, and the incommensurable debt we owe to one another as members of a suffering human community. The language in Federal Gods is, by turns, moving and provocative, and always attentive to the capacities of language to unite or to divide us. The triumph of this collection is that against the instrumentalising jargon of governments and paranoid racist scare quotes saturating the mainstream media, Saponia wields words in act of practical solidarity, extending a rare and necessary space of care, community, and love.’
Fran Lock, Author of Hyena! Jackal! Dog!
Read Culture Matters review of Federal Gods
From the Arab Spring and the UK riots of 2011 to civil wars in Syria, Iraq, South Sudan, Libya and the Ukraine, Western governments pick and choose their favourites, colour-coding the good revolutions and demonising those whom they cannot control as ‘terrorists’. Clare Saponia rigorously explores these confused and violent struggles, as if dissecting a blood orange – skin, pith, flesh, pips, juice – layer by layer from cause to consequence, aspiration to betrayal, defeat to renewed hopes of social justice. The Oranges of Revolution is a book about democracy and power, despotism and resistance, imperialism and revolution.
‘Urgent, energetic poetry for the emerging age; Clare Saponia’s work is adventurous, bold and unapologetically challenges the socio-political values of our times.’
Mike Jenkins, Red Poets
‘Clare Saponia commands exceptional poetic control over the most politically toxic topics of our time. Her polemical scope is unimpeded by fashionable inhibitions, confronting totem and taboo, and Grand Guignol of ongoing oil wars and the aggregate ‘Guantanamo of knowledge’ that is Western guilt, while also listening intently to the silent artilleries of domestic austerity. Saponia is one of the most accomplished poet-spokespersons on behalf of the speechless oppressed.’
Alan Morrison, The Recusant
Incited by the Gaza Offensive of 2008, Copyrighting War and other Business Sins goes far beyond this one period of conflict and takes a stand against all forms of warfare, whether politically, socially, racially, financially or ideologically motivated. Clare Saponia digs beneath the origins of these conflicts and how they have remained unresolved, recycled over and over and displaying the same familiar patterns of hatred, greed, prejudice, ignorance and hypocrisy.
Author’s note: The collection started on a long strategic walk along the Stolpersteine (stumbling blocks) of Berlin in the summer of 2008. I jotted down the contents of over 200 blocks, which also triggered some fascinating reactions from passers-by! One thing’s for certain, a crime as calculated and thorough as the Holocaust would not have been possible without a system of police registration in Germany and other neighbouring countries, mass murder being paradoxically anything but anonymous.
So, late 2008, when the conflict in Gaza came to a head, I decided to write each poem with a different memorial stone in front of me – with the aim of staying connected to the past, while writing very much in the present.
‘Witches, Warriors, Workers is an anthology of poetry, lyric essays and artwork from women, working from a variety of poetic and artistic traditions. It explores women’s complex relationship to work, to the environment, to our families, to our bodies, and to each other.’
Edited by Jane Burn & Fran Lock
‘The Kakania anthology is a conversation between two cities, two centuries, two eras – from the avant garde of the dying days of the Habsburg Empire in Vienna to the vanguard of 21st century London. An utterly unique and striking book, Kakania features work from over 40 artists and poets, each calling back to one figure of the Habsburg era: from Freud, Wittgenstein and Klimt to Schiele, Musil and Mahler.’
Edited by S.J. Fowler
‘The Robin Hood Book, unlike a number of collections of poetry, makes you feel included, not excluded. It is also the first time I’ve come across the glorious term “Lumpenproletariat”. Where do we sign?’ Greg Freeman, Write Out Loud
‘Provoking, entertaining, moving and heartening, it is an extraordinarily rich selection of
funny, angry, polemical, satirical, sad and wise poetry …a huge and hugely important book…’ Andy Croft, Morning Star
Edited by Alan Morrison and Angela Topping
‘Emergency Verse – Poetry in Defence of the Welfare State is a co-operatively produced protest anthology of poetry and polemic from 112 contributors, mixing the writing of many fired to verse for the first time in reaction to the austerity cuts.
This illustrated 300pp perfect-bound book was produced in a matter of weeks as a petition for the introduction of a Robin Hood Tax on the City and against the wholesale stripping of the British Welfare State by a brutalising £18 Billion. Patroned by Green MP Caroline Lucas, it is broadly an ethical socialist publication but its contributors come from a variety of backgrounds and beliefs, all united in their collective opposition to the austerity policies of the Tory-led government.’
Edited by Alan Morrison and Angela Topping