Hotel Petroleum by Mark Fiddes
Broken Sleep Books
Hotel Petroleum checks you into a world where the globalised hotel is both sanctuary and crime scene, lobby and blast radius, spa retreat and flood plain. Moving between Gulf high-rises, war-broken cities, Spanish beaches, Delhi art fairs and Anglican funerals, Mark Fiddes maps how oil money, tourism and empire seep into every room, every body, every view from the window. Fiddes is wickedly funny and deadly serious at once. Crayfish devour cities in the name of rights, a tank falls in love with a village, nude cyclists stall at Sloane Square, and poets queue uselessly on a doomed flight. Climate catastrophe, colonial hangovers and endless small wars sit beside family tenderness, hospital waiting rooms and the courage to say 'I love you' first. Formally agile and visually charged, these poems keep turning the reader towards the uncomfortable truth that our age of extraction and spectacle is already writing its fossil record, even as we queue for breakfast buffets and spa treatments. Hotel Petroleum is a brilliant, uneasy, darkly glittering book that asks what it means to seek comfort in a burning world.
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