Exciting news! 3:AM Press have just released a new collection of poems from the renowned Lee Rourke - and they're available in the store now.

Here's what people are saying:

Varroa Destructor taps the pressures of technology, boredom and isolation in the city. Restless, neurotic and thoroughly modern, Rourke's poems are little bullets of urban living. If you're not careful, they'll stick in your throat. -- Tom Chivers

There is a twinkling humour that runs through the book: a kind of funny nihilism through which Rourke brings a dark beauty to the mundane. Life outside of family and friendships can seem inherently pointless, but Varroa Destructor seems to, somehow, make these pointless things something to be interested in. The poems take our everyday lives, the things we do now, automatically as habit and reflect them back at the reader. Rourke invites us to question why we perform these routines and to see what beauty can be found within them. The bleakness and austerity of Rourke’s poetic voice allows the reader to see exactly what he is saying, without the poems being cloaked in ornamentation. -- Kit Caless, The Quietus

Like a lot of my favourite innovative writing, Lee Rourke's poems derive their originality by picking up on elements that are already in common use, and combining to create something entirely unexpected. It is the use of the dash which allows these prose poems to circle along, buying themselves time by interrupting themselves constantly. It's like listening to a singer who doesn't need to stop for breath. It's like being outstared by someone who hasn't blinked in years". -- Matthew Welton

And here's the blurb:

Each of the poems in Varroa Destructor occupies the space found in between poetry and prose, and more specifically: poetry and the 'poetic'. Relayed via a series of events, observations and analyses, these purposely reconstructed poems repeat a signal of everyday, humdrum decay. In detailing the minutiae of the working day - and in particular the modern, working office - Varroa Destructor scrutinises those nondescript moments that ordinarily pass us by, revealing a culmination of events which may form the real substance of our daily lives.

Playfully weaving into these poems riffs, thoughts and responses to the works of (among others) Francis Ponge, Wallace Stevens, and Jacques Derrida, alongside personal accounts of family illness, and tapping into the blurred realities of technological living, Lee Rourke manages to create a contemporary collection which at once feels strikingly modern, vital and moving - something that is knowingly haunted by 'poetry' itself.

Sounds good, doesn't it? Fly over to our store now.