The Salt Companion to Maggie O'Sullivan

Maggie O’Sullivan has been a significant force in the alternative British poetry scene since the 1970s. Her international reputation has continued to grow and she is widely regarded as one of the foremost feminist avant-garde writers working in Britain today.

This new volume of essays and interviews locates O’Sullivan in the wider context of contemporary British poetry and draws to light the wide-ranging influences which inform her work and her own influence upon a new generation of feminist avant-garde writing.

Tackling textual, visual and sound elements in her work her poetry is complex, challenging and rewarding. O’Sullivan is also a compelling performer of her work. Thematically she is capable of tackling animal vegetable and mineral ideas in her writing, drawing on mythological and even shamanistic components that are provocative and sensual.

This volume contains contributions from Charles Bernstein, Mandy Bloomfield, Ken Edwards, Romana Huk, Peter Manson, Nicky Marsh, Peter Middleton, Maggie O'Sullivan, Redell Olsen, Marjorie Perloff, Will Rowe, Robert Sheppard, Scott Thurston and Nerys Williams.

Chris Emery is the author of five poetry collections, including Modern Fog and, most recently, Wonder. He is the Director of Salt and a leading figure in independent publishing. His poetry is celebrated for its musicality and forensic eye, often dwelling on the sacred landscapes and history of North Norfolk. Widely anthologised, his work explores the beauty of the mundane and the dreamscape. He lives and works in Cromer.

Charles Bernstein was born in Manhattan in 1950. He has published 27 collections of poetry including With Strings, Republics of Reality: Poems 1975-1984 and Controlling Interests. His essays are included in My Way: Speeches and Poems and Content’s Dream: Essays 1975-1984. Bernstein is a professor at the University of Pennsylvania.

Peter Middleton was born in 1950 and grew up in both England and the United States. After a first degree at Oxford University, he took a PhD at Sheffield University, and studied for a year at SUNY Buffalo with Robert Creeley and Jack Clarke. He is the author of a book on masculinity, The Inward Gaze (1992), co-author with Tim Woods of Literatures of Memory (2000), and author of a book of essays on poetics, Distant Reading: Performance, Readership and Consumption in Contemporary Poetry (2005). His poetry and essays have appeared in magazines in the UK and US, and with Piers Hugill he is editor of Torque Press. He is a Professor of English at the University of Southampton.

Maggie O’Sullivan is a British-based poet, performer and visual artist. For over thirty years, her work has appeared extensively in journals and anthologies (including Poems for the Millennium, Volume 2) and she has performed her work, often in collaboration, internationally. She is the editor of out of everywhere: an anthology of contemporary linguistically innovative poetry by women in North America and the UK (1996). More recently is Body of Work (2006), ALTO (2009), WATERFALLS (2011) and murmur (2011). The Salt Companion to Maggie O’Sullivan is also available. Her website is www.maggieosullivan.co.uk.

William Rowe teaches contemporary British and Latin American poetry at Birkbeck College, where he is Director of the Contemporary Poetics Research Centre. He has written on Maggie O’Sullivan, Lee Harwood, Eric Mottram, Allen Fisher, and William Carlos Williams and is the author of Three Lyric Poets: Lee Harwood, Barry MacSweeney and Chris Torrance, forthcoming from Northcote House in the Writers and Their Work series. His translations of contemporary Latin American poets have been widely published, and he has three books on Latin American poetry, including Poets of Contemporary Latin America: History and the Inner Life (OUP, 2000).