DOOM ENGINES

A book-length series of poems working from, in multiple directions and in increasingly elastic ways, the 1990s video game series DOOM. The work gathered across the volume arises from sustained research into borders and the hostile environment; etymology; histories of the rental market; contemporary labour crises; grief and mourning; mental health and mad studies; and ecology and the ongoing climate emergency.

ENDORSING BLURB:

"As a child unspooled into the algorithmic darkbox that growls, you knew already that the demons splayed and splattered by your BFG9000 would one day feedback [SLASH]. Now, with Virtanen, in the ear and in the eye, we’re here: in engine microbiomes gaudy in fractious pile-up, the binary up our spines is breathlessly snagged; the moon’s bacilli brim over; Sartre’s mescaline crabs actually horrify as glitching morphologies of the ‘contractual sediment [that] overlays names’; a scum of landlords and hand-soap accretes round the rim. All demonic substance from Major onwards is here in association, cosmic and intra-cellular; not woven but smashed together in metonymic ragecore propulsively stressed; between sadism and anxiety, through grief and in love, ‘haptic matters in bronchial / glitzed mafia forum hold steady’.” -Tom Betteridge