Dreaming Backward by Alex Reed
"Who would have thought forty-nine short pieces about Butlin's holiday camps could be so touching? A kaleidoscopic look at the past, Dreaming Backward is an enchantment – together all the vivid, intense parts create strange patterns, catching the light of memory. Reading it, reality shifts and we are taken by surprise, travelling in time, nearer the tumble and drift where we forget we live.†Linda France "In this exhilarating poetic documentary, Alex Reed transports us to the ‘brightly hued reality' of Butlin's holiday camps with the All-Star Redcoats' Show and the Lovely Legs competition. Dreaming Backward is a compelling social history of a pre-digital era. But it is also a musing on perceptions of time, how we choose to fill our leisure hours, and how that might be judged by others. In its playful hybrid form, reminiscent of the Japanese zuihitsu tradition, incorporating myriad sources and using fragments, collage techniques, and occasional tracts of white space that provide interpretative space for the reader, Reed's movement on the page echoes the shifting, fragmented nature of memory. This startling mosaic of 49 passages numbered backwards will leave you interrogating your personal history – choices not taken, lives that might have been, and decisions yet to be played out.†Alexandra Corrin-Tachibana Dreaming Backward is very evocative and very resonant. ABOUT THE AUTHOR ALEX REED's poetry has been published in various print and online magazines. His pamphlets A Career in Accompaniment and These Nights at Home (with images by Keren Banning) were published by V. Press and explore themes of illness, care-giving and loss. His collection knots, tangles, fankles (V. Press, 2022) is a re-imagining of the work of radical psychiatrists R.D. Laing and A. Esterson on family life and ‘schizophrenia'. Alex previously worked as a family therapist in NHS and academic settings. He completed an MA Writing Poetry in 2018.
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