WARNING: Cruise Missile Liberals contains few proper poems. That is, poems with proper manners, proper etiquette or proper service to our national narratives. Poems that reassure the powerful. Poems that lie inert — with the smell of the museums. Poems that are, in a word, nice.

Instead, Spencer Gordon's debut smoulders with explosive contradiction — with a charismatic voice that rewires what we could ask for in a collection. Blending gaudy lyrical excess with blemish-ridden found material, it presents the reader with guilty pleasurable collisions. It is of the wretched present: online, urban, urbane and sweetly ironic. These are poems of play, rant, irreverence and lip; of sparkling newness haunted by the opulent, hungry dead. Works brimming with cheek that, every so often, stiffen to a punch to the gut. (From Nightwood Editions)

Cruise Missile Liberals is available in October 2017.