Playful, formal, satirical and tender, the poems in The Fabulanarchist Luxury Uprising are wildly wide-ranging. Jack Houston whisks the reader through meditations on family life, the teachings of Lucretius, the sexual potential of Captain Barnacles, and dreams of a socialist utopia, managing to be both deeply weird and touching.
In his debut pamphlet, Houston draws out and scrutinises the mundanities of life, showing how they can form part of something much bigger. His poems aim to awaken the capacity for revolution within us all, even if it only gets us as far as the roundabout in the local playpark.
“In the year 2121, we're all now too aware that a sofa is simply a bench
constructed from the hewn corpse
of a tree, covered in a mesh made from the amniotic fibres
of oppressedly mono-cropped cotton plants
& filled with the plumage
from many a murdered full-grown duck […]"
— from 'Utopia'
