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Still Lives with Apocalypse

Jennifer has a new pamphlet of poems called Still Lives with Apocalypse. It is the winner of the Prole pamphlet competition, 2020.

You can purchase a signed copy of this pamphlet by sending money to Jennifer via PayPal and including your contact details (name and address) for where to post the pamphlet. All payments include postage.

Reviews

Mark Conners

McGowan's "Still Life With Apocalypse" opens with a sequence where the reader is treated to a "second coming" of startling, deft wit. In the opening poem, the I of the piece gets off her/his tits with the man himself at the rear of a convenience store in modern day America. Rather than use Rizlas to construct their spliffs, they opt for pages of poetry instead. They talk about their mothers while toking, how his mothers "cry harmony/around your bloody feet" and "lay down the blues like smack." In another poem, Jesus is either a pacifist or a draft dodger and after burning his draft card he "...looks at the sky and tries not to think of dying." Elsewhere, it's Jesus himself, not Man City's actual Brazilian striker, Gabriel Jesus, who puts them 1 up early doors but then retires at the top of his game: "He only played for a year. When asked he would reel off his salary, say/I only need it for the rest of all time." In 80s Britain, he's both Jesus and Judas, pulling pints in the pub, on the house for the beleaguered miners. But he pays for the drinks "...with leftover pieces of silver.'

In Part 2, we run with the dirty angels, where, if you lie on a hill and "lie down with your picture of Jesus/he will put himself inside you/and make you real," seemingly shag you back to life. There's "A Thoroughly Modern Mary" who spends all day in a shrine and sees "Not a fuckin' soul" in this heathen world. And in "Promise of an Angel" we are left with the sad remembrance of an angel "...itching where my wings should be.'

"Still Lives With Apocalypse" is a hilarious and strangely moving pamphlet, irreverent and delicious and yet smattered with pathos. As an unrepentant lapsed Catholic, it was a curious yet guilty and unsettling joy to read over the Easter holidays.

Wendy Pratt

Still Lives with Apocalypse is one of those rare, wry, clever collections that strolls confidently into the reader's mind and settles down like it belongs there. There is humour here, and a neon light illuminated bareness of the soul that tricks you into thinking you are somewhere else; the States, perhaps, or drowning in a river or walking on water with bloody palms. These are coherent poems, the sort of poems that have you bedding down for the long haul, leaving you wishing there was more.

Edwin Stockdale

I was transfixed reading Still Lives with Apocalypse. McGowan transported me from contempory America to 15th Century Constantinople via the Miners' Strike and the Dorchester Hotel in the company of her own version of Jesus. These are very, very funny poems but also poignant, a remarkable achievement. McGowan's pamphlet haunts me still.