Travellers and Avatars

£ 9.99

Travellers and Avatars was shortlisted for the Live Canon First Collection Prize 2015.  Its fifty-two poems and prose pieces take the reader from a launderette in Lancashire to outer space; from the hard shoulder of the M6 all the way to a post-apocalyptic future where sailors rediscover a sunken Florida.  The final prose sequence, ‘Worlds’, recounts the voyage of a starship that may be a dream, a hallucination, or the story of a troubled marriage in modern Britain.

 

William Stephensonteaches English at the University of Chester.  His first poetry pamphlet, Rain Dancers in the Data Cloud(Templar, 2012), won an Iota Shots award.  His second pamphlet is Source Code(Ravenglass, 2013), winner of the Ravenglass Poetry Prize.  Reviewers have described his poetry as ‘quirky, refreshingly different and wide-ranging in its cultural references. Data made interesting in a way I would never have expected or anticipated in poetic form’ (Sarah James) and as setting up a world where ‘words slip away from their original meanings, become jargon, trademarks, or symbols on a broken keyboard’ (Tim Love).