Chris Emery

Chris Emery Poems

Chris Emery Biography

Chris Emery also known as Chris Hamilton-Emery (born 23 November 1963) is a British poet and literary publisher. Emery was born and grew up in Manchester and went to a convent-run primary school in New Moston before attending grammar school in Prestwich. It was following this that he began to study sculpture, painting and printmaking. He continued at Manchester College of Art and Design before taking a degree at Leeds Polytechnic, graduating in 1986. He subsequently destroyed all his art work, and began to focus upon his writing. After a brief attempt to train as an art teacher, Emery began work in a variety of jobs: insurance clerk, an administrator in a haematology department, a data manager in an oncology department, an information designer in public transport, and design manager at the British Council, before embarking on a publishing career — ending up as a director at Cambridge University Press. He left to concentrate on writing and literary publishing in 2002. Emery’s poetry began appearing in journals throughout the 1990s including The Age, Jacket, Magma, Poetry London, Poetry Review, Poetry Wales, PN Review, Quid and The Rialto. He was anthologised in New Writing 8 in 1999. A pamphlet, The Cutting Room, was published by Barque in 2000. A first full-length poetry collection, Dr. Mephisto, was published by Arc in 2002. He has travelled to perform his work in the USA and Australia. A second full-length collection of poetry, Radio Nostalgia, was published by Arc Publications in 2006. He was anthologised in Identity Parade: New British & Irish Poets (Bloodaxe 2010), edited By Roddy Lumsden. Emery is a contributor to The Cambridge Companion to Creative Writing, edited by David Morley and Philip Neilsen (CUP 2012). A third collection of poetry, The Departure, was published by Salt in 2012. Emery’s poetry is characterised by a dystopian vision of the world, the use of varied personae, an exuberant vocabulary, black humour and dramatic changes in register and tone. His work can shift between mainstream poetics and wild experimentation, often combining both within a single volume. His central themes appear to be the incongruousness of moral experience within modern society, the collapse or eradication of identity, and non-spiritual or secular redemption. He is also the author of a writers’ guide on publishing and marketing poetry, 101 Ways to Make Poems Sell. Working as Chris Hamilton-Emery, he is a Director of Salt Publishing an independent literary press based in Cromer, England. He was awarded an American Book Award in 2006 for his services to American literature. Hamilton-Emery has sat on the Boards of the Independent Publishers Guild and Planet Poetry, and occasionally works as a consultant in the publishing industry in the United Kingdom. He lives in Cromer with his wife and three children.)

The Best Poem Of Chris Emery

Mattress Thought

for Drew Milne

ecce worm so far nigh
in meagre hugs & fair fog
a low womb vending on him
as soon as whom to whole grunts
a thicket / neuter kids far off

my runt absconding puts
on cartilage thought / a mother
blenched / elohim / erring
& come to spend packets
in a low breath / devils plump

all solace is bestowed dust
even greedy nerves in dugs
covets doubt to rub rub rub
each dog of lymph / hefty
panting for the factory mullet

remember those foiled paces
still up in the tarpaulin grind
an evanescent lung tarred so
a post for giddy liquor or blear
shanks so still as seeps so

shored up again ripe a little
all splints again piled there
a combatant joy withered
while howling gut looms pert
in bent affordable promos

& the immutable crotch stifles
one positron / the dividend
of a zygote / infecting again
each pill nerve gantry
digging down in mono flakes

flames snagged idly in winter ash
or the salve of said stages
or the salve of a fritillary
or the lame spigot & monsieur
bowel / each idle wash of going

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