Cover reveal: Let the Dead by Dylan Brennan
We’re delighted to reveal the cover for the next poetry collection from Banshee Press, forthcoming on 8 June 2023: Let the Dead by Dylan Brennan. Let the Dead was designed by Anna Morrison and is now available for pre-order!
Deeply attuned to those things that make and unmake us, Dylan Brennan’s Let The Dead concerns itself with life’s alchemical processes. A couple breathe life into a doomed poppet, a photographer immortalises a corpse, Joyce and Breton rub shoulders on the streets of the poet’s adopted Mexico, where life is a tapestry of ‘delicate anthers’ and ‘disembodied tongues’. These dark meditations are set against poems which consider love, miscarriage, childbirth and the daily miracle of family life.
Beautiful and disturbing by turns, these reflections on Ireland and Mexico’s shared colonial past invoke topographies both real and imagined, where ‘things in the ground have a tendency to grow.’ Let the Dead reminds us of the power of art to shape our perception of history, and of the artist’s responsibility in a time of violence.
Dylan Brennan’s debut poetry collection, Blood Oranges, was published by the Dreadful Press in 2014 and was awarded the Patrick Kavanagh Award runner-up prize. In 2017 he collaborated on Guadalupe & Other Hallucinations, a series of exhibitions and an illustrated e-book, with Belfast-based visual artist Jonathan Brennan. In 2016 he co-edited Rethinking Juan Rulfo's Creative World: Prose, Photography, Film with Prof. Nuala Finnegan (UCC), a volume of academic essays on the work of Mexican writer/photographer Juan Rulfo. In 2018 Ireland Professor of Poetry Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin nominated him as recipient of the Ireland Chair of Poetry Bursary Award. He lives in Mexico City where he works as a teacher.
