With language that often reads like stream-of-consciousness but is meticulously wrought, these poems are the work of a restless and intelligent imagination. All of the big themes: belonging and exclusion, self realisation, racial politics and love in all its forms are grounded authentically in the particulars of detail.- Judy JohnsonKnow Your Country is a Newcastle noir, a series of insurgent riffs set to disabuse. Shyings discerning phrasing embodies a go on your nerve poetics, where the local, present moment imbued with its past knowing is offered as ballast against bogus ideas of progress, like the rubble of Haight-Ashbury dumped in Newcastle Harbour. Theres a male Jessica rabbit, PTSD, drug dealing, knives, but also sashiko stitch, caramel coffee and the anti-fame of snails.- Keri GlastonburyI love the sense of live presence, fit language and big personality in these poems of immersion in the sticky path of creaturely existence. Interested and interesting - you cant ask more than that.- Kate Lilley
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