We are excited to welcome the daring and innovative poetry press Permeable Barrier back to Housmans and help them launch their sophomore publication: Speculative Frequencies by Briony Hughes.

​In this invigorating new collection, Briony Hughes uses her experiences tracking bats through the Surrey Hills as a means to expand ‘communication’ beyond the human body. The bat as a cultural figure is small, blind, nocturnal, and occasionally sinister, but in Hughes’ poems they become a medium through which to interrogate the most pressing issues of our time; what happens when we abandon concepts of human exceptionalism and see ourselves as animals existing with other animals within an ecosystem? In a book of innovative engagements with language and visuality, Hughes explores the enmeshment of humanity within the natural world, and finds a moving kinship with these exceptional, easily overlooked creatures.

“The connection is there; it has been all along, but the poet boils it to our surface, dear reader. This collection by Briony Hughes is a masterpiece in feeling the majesty of other creatures vibrating on our skin. Feel the tabbing tapping through a tooth! I love this book!” 

CAConrad

“Where Nagel gave up on answering the question of what it is like to be a bat, Briony Hughes leans in. This is a poet who sound-sees, who turns the page into a night sky aflutter with creaturely life. Speculative Frequencies is at once an experimental field guide, playful eco-survey and love poem to the more-than-human world.“

 Isabel Galleymore

“Think in diameters! Information must come to the intelligence from all the senses’ wrote Thomas A. Clark and this seemingly simple phrase speaks to what is happening in Briony Hughes’ Speculative Frequencies, her intelligent, sensual book of bats. Sound, as we might expect, is key, a tapping, tabbing, pipping, pitting, batting against the ear through the echolocator onto the retro typewriter, a human/machine/bat conversation that can never keep up but is suggestively, erotically, embodied onto the page a la Charles Olson and/or Maggie O’Sullivan. Other pages evoke the concrete works of Cobbing and Morgan in their repetitive play on key bat/habitat words: ‘Repeat until the poem staggers’. The antecedents are visible, but the work is quirkily original, and also funny especially when Hughes gets to the ‘Index’, the ‘information’ bit. It isn’t always clear who is speaking/listening and to whom in this work of shifty pronouns and thus the tentative, playful and mysterious air of the project is sustained throughout this speculative text.”

Harriet Tarlo

Briony will be joined by guest readers Sarah Westcott, Robin Boothroyd, and Redell Olsen.

This is a free event, but we ask that you RSVP below.