The Rottweiler’s Guide To The Owner – S J Fowler
A poetry collection that changed how I think about poetry, and encouraged me to reprogram, and to deconstruct, when i try to think in language – it offers a new kind of clarity, meaning and affect by unconventional means.
Humbert Summer – A K Blakemore
One of the first contemporary poetry collections that encouraged me to take poetry seriously, so easily underestimated, on first read I felt I was reading a London hipster dirge, but Blakemore has great lyric power in her sharply coined phrases and the lines stayed with me, thinking about them still.
Garments Against Women – Anne Boyer
A deeply profound and intense exploration of a woman’s place against the harsh cliffface of academia under the heel of capital and the pressures of production. Very modern, the book blends memoir-auto-fiction-poetry to become a entirely new and very moreish book.
Collected Yeats – W. B. Yeats
I prefer to cherry pick with classical poets, I would have chosen Gerard Manley Hopkins but Yeats offers so many immortal lines and ideas; political, deeply personal, sexual, mythical – just a handful of his poems are a serious canon and its influence felt everywhere.
Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh
One of my favourite novels. Perhaps a controversial pick, but for me Waugh is a great satirist of human cruelty, vanity and innate folly. For me this book is an utterly luxuriant read to the point of decadence, but the ahead-of-its-time friendship/love story that goes beyond the limits of sexual definition, between Sebastian Flyte and Charles Ryder is a sublime account of the intense bonds human beings can form with one another.
Adam Steiner:
Novel – Politics of The Asylum – 2018 – a cleaner in a hospital tries to keep his head above water in a hospital falling apart.
Non-fiction – Into The Never – March 2020 explores the cultural impact behind Nine Inch Nails’ seminal 1994 album, The Downward Spiral, and how it reflects modern concerns about white male rage, young mental health and censorship of sexual deviance.
https://adamsteiner.uk/”