Publisher's Synopsis
Coffee Poems is the debut poetry collection by William Shier. Unique in style and voice, each poem claims to be the product of a meeting between the poet and another figure: Shakespeare, Foucault, Derrida, Beckett, Rhys, personal acquaintances, and more. This work plays with the comedies and ironies of metrical composition by binding colloquial speech with the poetical. The poems participate in the modernist, late-modernist, and post-modernist traditions whilst simultaneously declaring the impossibility of belonging to any movement. Coffee Poems challenges what it means to be creatively influenced and what it could mean to write poetry in a world of consumerism, hyper-connectivity, and great art. These are works written over coffee and are best enjoyed with a cup of the same.
