Shift Perception

<p><em>Shift Perception</em> is an arrestingly original debut. A well-known artist Lopez clips her sharp-edged new idiom out of the drained and bankrupt languages mediating everyday life - the familiar exhausted phraseology of the soundbite the voiceover the consultant and the gossip-column. In the depleted cliched materials she gathers magpie-like into her collage-like poetics Lopez contests the inexorable wasting in both senses of the word of our language. Her caustic critical yet intensely empathetic vision leaves you suddenly painfully sensitised to the things people say and when and why they decide to say them. Comic and frightening by turns these poems invest their borrowed banal-seeming vocabularies with freshened moral energy; with an acute ethical intelligence. Shift Perception dares you to do precisely that - to change perceptual and linguistic gear. But you'll find you know more about its processes than you expect. And you won't have read anything like it before. This collection relentlessly reminds us exactly how powerful a tool language can be in any number of different hands; I haven't read poetry as provocative or as exciting as this in a long while. -Alice Entwistle</p>