The poems in 'some possible endings & beginnings' explore desire for connection across physical and imperceptible boundaries. They are negotiations between this striving to know, and the constraints imposed on that by time, memory, distances and other people. They encompass birth, war, nights out, the news and many other everyday experiences.
Across this inventively visual collection, existence is a non-linear journey shaped by interconnecting origins and conclusions. Along the way, words and graphics form an expansive topography where black holes are as much part of the landscape as city streets. Waymarkers such as
arrows, lines and colours point towards both directional and psychological routes.
The multiple voices in these poems are sometimes internal, sometimes in conversation, but all share a drive to question ways of being. Uncertainty inhabits these pages, but here, that is a freedom as much as a weight.
Endorsements for some possible endings & beginnings:
“Unpredictable, sharp and timely, Laing’s visual poems transport the reader into a futuristic world of “countless happenings” and “possible endstops”. Like a poetic Pandora’s Box, bottled up frustration towards the current state of the world is released in every turn of the page, forming a shapeshifting textual universe that hooks you in. Hold tight.” - Astra Papachristodoulou, poet and artist
“These are serious poems about serious issues - war and global warming to name but two. Let us follow on behind the poet as they turn their penetrating gaze from the universe to the world, to the grim reality of the city, to the very private moments with loved ones. In doing so this important collection brings a sparkling fresh perspective in its attempt to make sense of the increasing fragility of life.” - Jim Carruth, City of Glasgow Makar
“Woosh! Goes the line of flight in Julie Laing’s motile debut, propelling feeling in ‘night-buzz’, seismic instruments and singing silver fish. Visual and concrete poetics take metabolic and elemental form here, connecting a swathe of daily experiences to the multitudes of planetary event through an open field which elongates, pulsates, bends, glows, breaks. This is a philosophical inquiry into being and becoming: what it means to notice events through detail’s approximations, to feel ‘ecstatic nothingness’ at lightspeed, to relate to the mother berg losing its trillion tonnes of icy newborn. Playing with the fold, the axis, the cut, Laing explores geopolitical trauma and bodily event in shifting registers and sensory detail at scale. We find ourselves at the city’s edge, in screenshots of scheme memories, in the war-machine’s blast of white phosphorous, in hunger and the ‘phantom wake’ of history. This is a poetics of intense empathy and solidarity, a search for catharsis, an ethical halation for the mediated age." - Maria Sledmere, poet and artist