God Complex

Author: Allen, Rachael

Poetry

Published on 18 January 2024 by FABER & FABER in the United Kingdom.

LONGLISTED FOR THE LAUREL PRIZEGod Complex is a sweeping and corrosive epic, a narrative poem that tells the story of the breakdown of a relationship against a backdrop of progressive environmental degradation. A grieving body moves through states of toxicity, becoming an instrument for measuring the impact of pollutants. an entwining of human and non-human, built environment and natural landscape blurs perspective and distorts logic, creating an erratic decline into disorder. Loss is divined everywhere: in human relations, in the ruptures of class and privilege, and the poisoning of the planet.

It is through a purgatorial leavening of pain that the narrator comes to terms with the delicate, shifting states of the ecological systems that merge with and surround us to create new forms of being and devotion. The result is visionary - a book that vibrates with urgency and feeling.

'This is a very fine book, quite unlike anything I've seen for a long time. It deserves to be read, and read again, and savoured.' Matt Merritt, Magma