Publisher's Synopsis
Standard Twin Fantasy is the new pamphlet of poems by Sam Riviere, author of 81 Austerities (Faber & Faber, 2012), which won the Forward Felix Dennis Prize for Best First Collection. We encounter in these pictures a vast, technical vocabulary. The girls' faces indicate minds that seem oddly completed. We might fabricate a story of how their images appeared before us: this seduction begins, like all seductions, with a wound.
Only the light is allowed to touch their forms, to draft their faces. To read them is to admit a sort of vacancy, a pain. In another room, a conversation moves money through the world, under captions of smoke. Among their angles, the distance of a look, a shoulder's choice, this offered clavicle or wrist implies an entrance. Averted, their eyes identify a deficit. It is here that the genres begin. In these pictures you encounter those things you have denied yourself.
Sam was born in 1981 and studied at Norwich School of Art and Design, Royal Holloway, and UEA, Norwich. In 2005, he co-founded the anthology series Stop Sharpening Your Knives, now also published by Egg Box. He currently lives in Belfast.
