Review of Petra Whiteley's awesome forthcoming book, The Liquid Metropolis

Petra Whiteley's defiant latest tome, The Liquid Metropolis, published by Erbacce Press, sets about a ferocious dismantling of the persistently flourishing Social-Christian tenets. Frame by frame, poem by poem, stone by stone, look by look, in a challenging long-metrage between diary and diatribe, poetic epiphany and novelistic dystopia, Whitely walks the amazed reader through the post-apocalypse metropolis of misguided affects. The gaze of leering masculine eagles, the seething anaesthetic of cowardly hatred, did not waylay her from her task. No stone is left un-turned. This is a work of unabashed pride. To walk with these words is to understand the meaning of standing out in the rain, resolutely outside, where the rains do not feel the same, where something ripped from ugly becomes beautiful. From within the tree, poetry never abandons the reader throughout a thrilling conversation with the myths of cherished lies. Poetry emerges victorious as mind and body, as the seconds which exceed Time, as the bare statement which kicks and shouts as it is, in silence, as the nothing that lived and breathed, even these words, even the sun, even its fire, even the unattainable, which crawls 'as a syllable on a promised tongue/ forever no/thing.'

I imagine this enterprise was not without risks and that therefore first it is our role as readers to salute the bravery of this author, who has paid no heed to fashion nor to commodity, but to has listened to her deepest sentiment and revealed with such harsh and beautiful invective, the bare bones of the post-capitalist predicament. 'The clock hands/ of my practical suicide turn/the light backwards, no outer/limits…' Since Artaud, the necessity to un-live and un-think the colonial powers of Christian absurdities has been paramount. Here the manual to exist outside continues, in the rain and without lying. '(God's) endless fingers of words claw suicide/into the everyday smell of my flesh and its throbbing/is the only life left.' Or better still:

'I was there, playing dead for them, the oak of silence growing
into my lungs. Was noise a bruise that spread whitely into me?
Yes. In that poisoned room within the tree, I left traces of death,

lived backwards, the slow drip of birthday butchery.

So long to language and its pain!

Breathe to break the hush of words into music,
unconstrained and unshattering.'.


Hope is for the misguided but love entertains the brave, a love you build between the slow suicides of souls whose de-mystified sexualities can start to sing a song of muscle and beauteous, poetic bone. disillusions many ripped from the misfortunes of previous identities can be stripped in a kind of ritual post-mortem of manners and realities. Can one say, following such adventurers in the domains of the Spirit such as Artaud that another body is possible:

'I wanted you to watch
Me die, to watch the trees growing from my hands
Into the stark digits of night and be the monument
Of my liquid sex. To
Witness the opiate orgasms
In my resurrection.'

What for convenience sake we still call man or woman suffers here a keen and rigorous un-thinking. 'I am the void, the pain and the whiskey lie, a sucked bone, a flute,/and as I,/you will/(desc)end softly as a barren rattle sound.' The Liquid Metropolis is a book-machine in the great tradition of radical thinking, a book for new lover-thinkers, into the hope-less beyond of the naked end of the world. For those who, dare I say, have never bent their knees to kneel nor sheltered their eyes from the glaring truth of society's founding lies. This is a resistance song, a remarkable bottle hurled into the ocean of nought. To collect its messages is to accept that a book requires the reader to work, to pause for moments to collect one's whole intellectual history, to agree to be challenged, to be hurt, to be attacked by the anger of the author, to travel with her to the trees and the colours which sing on the other side: 'our laughter will echo like hard rain when we finally slip away.'


We have become accustomed to Whitely's unstinting intellectual rigour, to the beauty of many of her poems, but never has her true instinct been able to express itself with such uncompromising clarity and fire. The Liquid Metropolis is what the burning libraries of 2012 will need, an at times brutal poetic pamphlet whose language prepares the audacious for the trees which will grow from their hands, for a new laughter for the living who do not wish to postpone their desires and abdicate their enjoyments. 'I dream of Thames at midnight, where at least a rabbit can choose/ the softness of one's own never ever after and push hard towards/the dawn in the city.'

a realist song

i dreamt of you last night walking in the rain
we held hands once
my shadow and yours
sunk in the bed of a mystical river
we sipped ginger tea and honey

i read the diaries of unknown friends
the news of raging madness
reaches my ear lobes too often of late

our children's lungs breathe the slow train of destruction

the paranoid plot simmers
the ice melts and endangered whales are culled
new species of alien are sown in fields of falsity

we walked hand in hand
balancing pints of stout in brown paper bags
we had many vaguely pleasurable moments


we once took to the streets
to throw our anger at the mind occupiers
from over barricades of fibs
fiercely guarded by black truncheons of faith

1990 Union Square New York

three thousand unpublished poems later
i am caught underground
listening to gusting cold winds whistle down the Thames

things are much worse
the proliferation of craziness at an all time high

i know there is a war out there
but i don't want victims
i don't want my anger to close in a fist
i have to keep words flowing from these fingers
pouring molten promise into lost causes
i just want to register these dry stone paths of word
i will have as many names as events will assign me

i have you my funny milk and honey face
our wonderful hilarity

i need nothing else today

there are only landscapes

the lack of it
the half
the less than half
of its diminishing crescent

where once the languishing
only the beat
only the voice alone
in the company of voices
solitudes of light

there is no door
it is the placeless hour
the handle within
leading to the wide expanses

once the wall
broken down so many times
generations of schizos
couldn't see
your beauty
they couldn't take your tongue
from head to toe
laughing with incandescent seed

Casanova did
so much hurt in the wake of love
young girls broken for life
the machine of masculinity
of the twin continents
bridged for instants
by the transcendental prick-pen

stretch them
the canvas of instants
pour landscapes of blue
into the mouth of your song

once there was a wall

now there are only landscapes

and you are not even blue

Poem reading Rimbaud's Illuminations 2

tears rise from piano keys
as wings aroused
by the irrelevance of a sitting torso

with baked finger tips i sing you
with waves of unseen openings

open for me this night
suck the flying from sparrow
the hemmed shade from black sun

burn every ambition
maim every hope

with your caressing

i have been dead before
but not dead enough

too much of me prised open by the luminous outside
when it was i who should have been obliterated

to let morning sing within me

Poem reading Rimbaud's Illuminations 1

with the bees of ancient hedges
with the daggers of gruesome murders

wailing human errors walk blind into every vault of turquoise light

they do not see naked water lovers sing and laugh

they do not hear the misfit genius at once angel and foul

languishing he jeers
his superiority so clear they have tried to silence him
for centuries the same story
Casanova can tell

rivers of dawn carry the corpse of night's iniquity

it rests in so-called memory and rots

so i walk with the illuminated one with the beast
with his song with the sense of his song

burlesque dawns keep coming

over and over again

the ecstasy of magic lips

is that the sense of eternity