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Ahren Warner has published three books of poetry with Bloodaxe, including Hello. Your promise has been extracted (2017), which was shortlisted for the Roehampton Poetry Prize 2018. His debut, Confer (2011), was shortlisted for both the Forward Prize for Best First Collection and the Michael Murphy Memorial Prize 2013. His fourth collection, I'm totally killing your vibes, is published by Bloodaxe in 2023. His collections have received three Poetry Book Society Recommendations and awards including an Arts Foundation Fellowship. He works across writing, photography and moving image, with an intermedia project, The sea is spread and cleaved and furled published by Prototype in 2020, and a film I'm thinking what would sound sincere but also, like, oh, that's super cute, selected for Bloomberg New Contemporaries (2020).
Warner’s verse appears to discuss this collocation of scarified surfaces – their bitty, cracked, granular noise, redolent of industrial disuse, and abuse – with the hygienic space in which art is consumed... this is poetry (it is poetry) of extraordinary poise and power. -- Vidyan Ravinthiran * The Poetry Review * Theatrical, toxic and oddly gorgeous… Warner moves from playful social observation, through reflections on memory and artifice, to a near-Baudelairean spleen, his games with language and ideas as serious in their investigations of the given world as any philosophy. -- John Burnside * PBS Bulletin * A messy, disturbing triumph in the traditions of Arthur Rimbaud and John Berryman: how Le bateau Ivre or The Dream Songs would read if they’d been written today. It too could be the anthem of a generation. -- Fiona Sampson * The Guardian, on The sea is spread and cleaved and furled * As I read it I felt I had wandered from a party and stumbled into something vulnerable, something human and real beyond the clinking of glasses and fake laughter. That I had gotten the chance to hide in a closet and listen to a conversation I needed to hear but couldn’t quite access on my own… a conversation between the speaker and the other, and most importantly – a conversation between Mr Warner and himself. What a strange joy to be invited in. -- Matthew Dickman * on The sea is spread and cleaved and furled *
