Wetbulb: Jac Common

Released 20th June 2024
Edition of 100 copies. *
ISBN: 978-1-3999-8984-8

“Jac Common’s wetbulb is both heat stress and dewy physic against ‘dry despair’: these beautiful flue-poems and prose ‘eyots’ strain towards intensive definition, carving out channels and culverts across a sensorium thick with grievous heat-wreckage. But their ‘layered razor / in the ooze I cut’ takes no solace in supplementing knowns: wetbulb wants to slice through the drought-world’s stultifying everyday towards fluid and granular relation: sharply, it listens out–what ‘fractal maps of ecologies’ can be heard in ‘goose bill snicks on grass’?–and ducks the surface for alternative choreographies, for minnow-flit ‘logics of shoaling’. For Common, ‘the sound of the river folds back to everything’; in fluent ‘everything’ there is not only ‘this’.” (Tom Betteridge)

“‘Sensing-through fluids’, wetbulb refracts the fluttering surfaces of creaturely worlds we inhabit and dream feverishly in, via ebbing contractions of river-bird-fish mouths and hyper-proximities of evolutionary and overheated time. Swerving amongst formal knowledges, climatic deformations, and capitalism’s apocalypses, these poems try to live differently alongside nonhuman ‘flicker, pause, swirl, recline’, playing out a syntax of spiders ballooning gossamer on electric fields of hot air. Don’t worry, there’s stuff to snack on too: scrumped pomegranates and trespassed meadowsweet, queer picklewater puddings and dusty opal barbecues by the dinosaurs in Crystal Palace Park. If ‘space can thicken as temporary vortex’, what whirls is iridescent grot.” (Katy Lewis Hood)

If you are an international customer please get in touch via email – do not purchase a UK copy***

Jac Common is a writer from Nottingham. Their academic, critical, and poetic work is out in several places.