The Bible II
Sam's book should carry a warning: Read at your own risk! Stepping into its pages is akin to riding a tiger which may devour you at any point, in turn marvelling at Sam's exquisite mastery over language and deep to the bone feeling every single nuance of the poet's fight for survival. There is a beauty and furore intrinsic to human existence, should we allow ourselves to feel it it. Sam does and in his book wrestles the intangible into a fleetingly recognisable shape.
- Myriam San Marco Bournemouth Poet Laureate & author of "Sakura" (Burning Eye Books)
A technically adept, structurally experimental yet utterly visceral wall of sound and feeling. Brilliant and brutal from the existential shudder of "I'm not looking for God, I found them. now it’s my turn to hide" , through the ruby grin of "to praise Prosthesis" to the distant sweetness of "Saint of Morrow & of missing" and the epiphania of "Saint of knives and other apocrypha" This is an important work. a beautiful heretical Litany to an empty heaven. Part invocation all interrogation.
All at once battle cry, hymnal, and dirge. Firm in the tradition of Hardy and Donne via the polyrhythmic music of Kaveh Akbar & Neil Hilborn.
- Adrian B Earle author of "we are always and forever ending" (Broken Sleep Books)
An explosive, triumphant debut –my heart aches at the simple, sharp beauty of the writing.
Sam Grudgings approaches language in a way I’ve never seen before and The Bible II shows him as a wild sorcerer composing a fever dream; intricately written, vividly playful and utterly spellbinding.
Grudgings expertly balances gravitas, humour, genuine heartbreak and satirical self-awareness to expose the sacrament of suffering that goes so often silenced in those seeking and living in sobriety.
This book pulls you in, brings you to the cinematic and deeply personal world of the writing and lets us off gently, but not without having been moved from the journey
-Ciarán Hodgers Author of Cosmocartography (Burning Eye Books)
A defiant splatterpunk body horror on the Inneracy of theological doctrine, in the context of recovery, addiction, death & grieving. A kind of reverent aching. A glorious descent into havok & profanity.
Exploring what god is to an addict, The Bible II is a gory, surreal How-Not-To-Guide for alcoholics coming to terms with their own saviour complex in absence of traditional methods of recovery.
Saints, Apostles, Whales & all things Holy are warped, re-examined, chewed & appropriated into something more fitting for the modern climate. Pianos erupt through bodies & through half remembered or halfway forgotten conversations; people become buildings & their dereliction;everyone is scarred & replete with teeth but everyone is worthy of Redemption it just depends how. Mixing violent, aching prose with experimental forms, the grotesque & sublime play off each other in tangible ways that makes the apocalypse both personal & revelatory. Owing as much to Giallo films as it does to Hardcore Punk Bands like Orchid & Circle Takes The Square as well as the wildness of poets like Fran Lock, Daniel Borzutzky & Joelle Taylor this unsettling mediation grows to a crescendo of hope, if you’ve the temerity to reach out & grab it.
Exploring how culpability is dealt with in regards to making amends to the ghosts of past lives, whilst living through a mass extinction event of our own making. despite the gallows humour & frank brutality moments of tenderness shine in amongst the maelstrom of words that translates Sam’s frenetic explosive performance style to the page. The poems bleed into each other reframing narratives held up as gospel with the context of perspective as each page turns creating new understanding.
The world is ending but if you need something a little more holy to guide your soul wherever you think you are heading this might be it.