Body, Remember

By Wes Lee

Body, Remember takes its title from a poem by the Greek poet C.P. Cavafy, who, in sensuous imagery, illuminates the persistence and power of the body-memory of desire. Conversely, in this pamphlet, Lee addresses the body s capacity to hide, to deceive, and draw a veil of silence, to create a blank space within when faced with trauma. As a whole, the collection forms a kind of oubliette of forgetting.

Wes Lee's poetry has appeared in publications in the UK, NZ, and AUS, including The London Magazine, Poetry London, Magma, Westerly, Best New British and Irish Poets 2016 and The University of Canberra Vice Chancellor s Poetry Prize Anthology. She is the author of Cowboy Genes (Grist Books, 2014) and Shooting Gallery (Steele Roberts, 2016). She was the 2010 recipient of the BNZ Katherine Mansfield Literary Award, New Zealand s foremost award for the short story. Most recently she was placed in The London Magazine Poetry Prize 2015, and The Troubadour Prize 2014. She was a lecturer in Fine Arts at Auckland University of Technology for many years. She grew up in a working class household in Lancashire and now lives in Wellington, New Zealand.

In Body, Remember, Wes Lee catalogues a domino of broken things with deft poignancy and dark humour. She draws our attention to the fact, that even as we read and breathe, our bodies are in a state of breaking. - Michael Stewart

Wes Lee's beautiful, sobering collection gives a skeleton upon which to hang the intangible. It speaks to transience, to trauma, to the inevitability of time passing. This is poetry to return to again and again. - S.J. Bradley