‘81 Austerities’ is a collection of poems and promotional material by Sam Riviere, first serialised on this tumblr between May and July 2011. The poems are scheduled to be published in book form by Faber & Faber in August 2012.
The brief is to register a passive/aggressive response to the ‘austerity measures’ implemented by the coalition government in the UK in the wake of the late-2000s financial crisis. The project aims to apply ‘cuts’ preemptively to poetry itself, experiencing this deprivation on the levels of sentiment, structure, and subject matter.
The series was completed on the author’s 30th birthday.
“austerity figures as a revocation of generosity, a violence done to form, a grain to the surface of language”
New Statesman
“A brilliantly modern vision of boredom and deprivation”
Dazed&Confused
