The Lives of Z
Format:Paperback
Publisher:Liverpool University Press
Published:28th Apr '25
Should be back in stock very soon
Featuring the poem 'Autoemotive Funerals I-IV' (The Forward Book of Poetry 2026)
Olivia McCannon’s latest collection is shot through with questions. How ecological is English? How do you read an unreadable world, or a transforming planet?
The Lives of Z is an inventory of poem-artefacts gleaned from the spoilheaps of a speculative future. Each ‘find’ emerges with the randomness of any archaeological discovery, in that moment when its significance hangs in the air. Except that here, life is growing out of the data.
In this space of provocation and encounter, the reader is invited to “play Z’s game” and crash-test different ways of being in language. What will I have been? Who or what owns the ‘collective possessive’? How many life forms can inhabit the same pronoun?
Z, the creative principle of life – multitudinous, networked and irreverent – is running the experiment, in an unrepentantly ‘bad science’ mode.
Salvaged from what can’t be thrown away, these poems meet uncertainty with creativity, searching for the freedom and the words to reclaim human and earthly connections.
"Olivia McCannon has done an extraordinary thing: forged a new poetic language for the ‘Anthropocene.’ Even as it faces the unbearable, this remains a work of hope. Hope that the 'artefacts' gathered within these pages can transform. Hope that what is left can change the story. The Lives of Z is a Boundary Stone all its own - marking the possible." Sinéad Morrissey
"Olivia McCannon is a poet and thinker of deep and wild intelligence, whose poems speak with a voice of our times: playful, urgent, mesmeric. The Lives of Z is an admirable achievement." Tara Bergin
‘While there is an undeniable emphasis on the ecological in this collection – it’s easy to imagine The Lives of Z joining the likes of Inger Christensen’s alphabet (1981) as an essential text of ecopoetry for years to come – McCannon’s greatest theme is one of interconnectedness, revealing how the natural and the digital, the political and the financial, the emotional and technological are all parts of a complex whole, a single system showing signs of dangerouswear and tear.’ Rowland Bagnall, The Poetry Review
ISBN: 9781836243045
Dimensions: unknown
Weight: unknown
80 pages