Bøker av Chris Price

"Lobster's tale is the third book in the kåorero series. The kåorero project invites new and exciting collaborations - for two different kinds of artistic intelligence to work away at a shared topic."--Colophon.

Brief Livesis an eccentric collection of biographical anecdotes and fictional vignettes in which famous figures such as Goethe, Petrarch and Antonin Artaud rub shoulders with impecunious aristocrats, actors and art historians as well as a range of fictional characters caught amid the daily chaos of their lives. Here a dead man recounts his experiences as a Jesus impersonator. A wife reflects on the unhappiness of holidays. A doctor conducts altitude experiments on prisoners. Lott loses his mother's ashes in Amsterdam, and Nietzsche dances naked round a stove in Turin. These small, curious pieces deliver the reader on an A-Z journey towards the brilliant long essay 'Variable Stars', which takes in the French poets Mallarme and Villiers, as well as Jonathan Franzen, Janet Frame and Nigel Cox. A meditation on mortality and the tasks of recording, collection and recollection we undertake to stave it off,Brief Livesis a genre-crossing work that makes a plea for what historian Simon Schama has called 'the eloquence of peculiarity'.

How does 'music hold us up'? In The Blind Singer, Wellington writer Chris Price 'cultivates the art / of listening' to explore this question. Price has a clear and precise ear and the poems dance and shimmer around 'the heart of our hearing'. And she draws on wider material: Music and science meet, shake hands, are introduced to history. Scepticism contends with superstition, and blindness and sight interrogate each other, eventually agreeing that 'Sometimes/ you have to turn away so you can see'. Price knits the curious and the arcane into her lines in poems variously elegiac, melodic, fiery, charming, observant and dramatic. The Blind Singer ends strongly with Price's long sequence 'The Angel Question', originally written for the science-literature project Are Angels OK? (2006). Here Price considers - by way of Einstein, Rilke and Picasso - how 'each bright / idea has its history': looking for traces of angels; walking the bright line between poetry and physi; and concluding that 'maybe a life can hang / from a thread of song'. Bursting with musical elements from bells, nursery rhymes and traditional ballads to Chaplin and Einstein playing string quartets and the Tubists' Universal Brotherhood Association, The Blind Singer is a luminous performance that continues to reverberate in the head long after the reading is over.

A magical and mad exploration of a most amusing and unexpected assemblage of novelties and oddities