The One That Got Away

New Binary Press is proud to announce the forthcoming publication of Graham Allen’s highly-anticipated first collection of poetry, The One That Got Away.

Graham Allen moved to Ireland in 1995 and is now a Professor of Literature in the School of English at University College Cork. The One that Got Away was shortlisted for The Crashaw Prize in 2012, and the title poem won the Listowel Single Poetry Prize in 2010. Allen’s life poem, Holes, was first published by New Binary Press in 2012.

Drawing parallels between historically epic and minute natural agents of violence, The One that Got Away provides a sustained if tangential meditation on the post-9/11 world at home and abroad. Flitting between the mythological, the historical, the economic and the private, these poems urge us to consider deeper connections which normally evade the eye and the mind.

The One That Got Away will be launched during the Cork Spring Poetry Festival, Thursday February 13th, Cork City Library, at 2pm.

We are delighted to announce that the guest readers will be Gerry Murphy, Billy Ramsell & Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin.

Admission is free. Finger food will be provided. All welcome.

Click here to download a preview of The One That Got Away

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Read what others are saying about the collection:

Graham Allen’s The One That Got Away is an astonishing advance on his earlier poetry. Those I have read interested me but seemed still in transition. This new work is a throwback to the High Romantics. It is haunted by Blake, Shelley, and Keats, and is a worthy continuation of their magnificent tradition.

Should Graham Allen continue to leap ahead of himself like this, he may yet achieve permanence as a poet.

— Harold Bloom, author of The Anxiety of Influence and The Western Canon

Graham Allen shines a light on the processes that connect what we know with how we feel, as well as being witty, exuberant and truthful. These are poems that impel us to search and renew our experience and our ways of thinking. They excavate inside metaphors; to use his phrase, they swivel the maps.

— Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, poet

Reading Graham Allen is an always stimulating and often jolting experience that seekers of unblinkingly engaged poetry will enjoy. The unrecognisability of the present is Allen’s theme and his poems are a kind of anti-prophecy, bearing constant anxious witness to our unsure and destabilizing period in which we cannot guess what’s coming next. The one that got away is a recommended read for all the doubters, questioners and heretics of the literary world.

— Dave Lordan, poet