Surge

by Jay Bernard

Overview

*Shortlisted for the Costa Poetry Award 2019*

*Shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize 2019*

*Shortlisted for Forward Prize for Best First Collection 2019*

*Winner of the Ted Hughes Award for New Work in Poetry*

Jay Bernard’s extraordinary debut is a fearlessly original exploration of the black British archive: an enquiry into the New Cross Fire of 1981, a house fire at a birthday party in south London in which thirteen young black people were killed.

Dubbed the ‘New Cross Massacre’, the fire was initially believed to be a racist attack, and the indifference with which the tragedy was met by the state triggered a new era of race relations in Britain.

Tracing a line from New Cross to the ‘towers of blood’ of the Grenfell fire, this urgent collection speaks with, in and of the voices of the past, brought back by the incantation of dancehall rhythms and the music of Jamaican patois, to form a living presence in the absence of justice.

A ground-breaking work of excavation, memory and activism – both political and personal, witness and documentary – Surge shines a much-needed light on an unacknowledged chapter in British history, one that powerfully resonates in our present moment.

‘Reading Jay Bernard’s Surge is like tapping into an energy source that reveals, in a blasting combination of excavation and incantation, a surfacing understanding that connects the landscapes of the New Cross fire and the Grenfell Tower fire…and delivers these revelations with a strength and a gravity and a communal force of voice that shakes every inhumane system’ Ali Smith, Newstatesman

‘Politically and lyrically compelling’ Raymond Antrobus, Observer, 'The Best Books of 2019 – Picked by the Year's Best Writers’

'A range of poetic forms bring energy to this reappraisal of race, nation and embodiement' Sandeep Parmar, Guardian Season's Reading: Poetry

**A NEW STATESMAN, GUARDIAN & DAILY TELEGRAPH BOOK OF THE YEAR**

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781784742614
Publisher:	Penguin Random House UK
Publication date:	06/20/2019
Pages:	80
Product dimensions:	5.31(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.30(d)

About the Author

Jay Bernard is the author of the pamphlets Your Sign is Cuckoo, Girl (Tall Lighthouse, 2008), English Breakfast (Math Paper Press, 2013) and The Red and Yellow Nothing (Ink Sweat & Tears Press, 2016), which was shortlisted for the Ted Hughes Award 2017. A film programmer at BFI Flare and an archivist at Statewatch, they also participated in ‘The Complete Works II’ project in 2014 and in which they were mentored by Kei Miller. Jay was a Foyle Young Poet of the Year in 2005 and a winner of SLAMbassadors UK spoken word championship. In 2019 Jay was selected by Jackie Kay as one of Britain's ten best BAME writers for the British Council and National Centre for Writing's International Literature Showcase. Their poems have been collected in Voice Recognition: 21 Poets for the 21st Century (Bloodaxe, 2009), The Salt Book of Younger Poets (Salt, 2011), Ten: The New Wave (Bloodaxe, 2014) and Out of Bounds: British Black & Asian Poets (Bloodaxe, 2014).

Editorial Reviews

"Haunting, historical, archival and imaginative... a stunning debut" - Bernardine Evaristo - New Statesman, Books of the Year

"Surge is a radical hybrid, painfully beautiful multigenerational ghost story, a social document, and a work of political archaeology. It is an indictment of this country's systemic hostility to its black, Asian and ethnic minority population, and the scandalous lack of accountability when this system claims lives. It is a heartbreaking and brilliant book about an ongoing tragedy" - Max Porter - Guardian, *Books of the Year*

"Politically and lyrically compelling" - Raymond Antrobus - Observer, *Books of the Year*

"Sensitive but devastating verse" - - Financial Times, *Summer Reads of 2019*

"This affecting poetic exploration of the New Cross Fire of 1981 (dubbed “The New Cross Massacre”) is incantatory, lyrical and documentary. It makes a deep impact both on account of its own narrative and in the wake of Grenfell" - Elizabeth-Jane Burnett - The Sunday Times

"A sad and angry consolation, alert to the past... Surge is a mature work, with lyricism both poetic and pop... [One] of British poetry’s most distinctive new voices" - Tristram Fane Saunders - Daily Telegraph

"Although the fire, the subsequent protests and the founding of the Black People’s Day of Action were documented by poets Linton Kwesi Johnson and Benjamin Zephaniah among others, Bernard’s work uniquely addresses a new generation encountering this past almost afresh, as it is echoed painfully inthe present... The collection’s major achievement is its unfailing attentiveness to the framing of history through the stories of individuals and collectives that the poet holds, urgently, ethically and so skilfully, in their hands" - Sandeep Parmar - Guardian

"If there were ever to be a twenty-first century Auden, with all the invention and cultural understanding, understanding of tradition and sense of the speed and the human outcome of foul politics, Jay Bernard is it" - Ali Smith -

From the Publisher