Streak Artefacts, a sequence of 100 poems with intermittent accompanying visuals, is out now on Department Press for £5. Thanks to Richard Barrett for publishing it and to Tina Darragh, SJ Fowler and Robert Sheppard for the cover quotes.
"Tom Jenks contaminates all economies of tale in this laugh-a-letter frisbee of pun. Multinational corporations, video games, Renaissance poetry, TV shows, medieval archives, app-a-lots, and [s]top chefs all take turns having their hair styled by Samuel Beckett at the Mongolian People’s Revolutionary Party disco. Do not miss this opportunity to go streaking with the best tattoo larkest around." - Tina Darragh
"Streak Artefacts is as subtle, witty and incisively intelligent a mediation on the reservoirs of language that lie pooling around us as any work of poetry you are likely to come across. It is endlessly humorous, laugh inducing even, but far more than that, it is a work that maintains both its profundity and deference by emphasising its individuality, its uniqueness - it is 100 moments of the present, in all its weird, sad, knobby glory, on this occasion fashioned together and wholly made anew by the interventions of one of the most remarkable British poets of this early century. We will look back to this time and talk about Tom Jenks as a wizard and books like Streak Artefacts as magic eggs he was laying." - SJ Fowler
"Tom Jenks contaminates all economies of tale in this laugh-a-letter frisbee of pun. Multinational corporations, video games, Renaissance poetry, TV shows, medieval archives, app-a-lots, and [s]top chefs all take turns having their hair styled by Samuel Beckett at the Mongolian People’s Revolutionary Party disco. Do not miss this opportunity to go streaking with the best tattoo larkest around." - Tina Darragh
"Streak Artefacts is as subtle, witty and incisively intelligent a mediation on the reservoirs of language that lie pooling around us as any work of poetry you are likely to come across. It is endlessly humorous, laugh inducing even, but far more than that, it is a work that maintains both its profundity and deference by emphasising its individuality, its uniqueness - it is 100 moments of the present, in all its weird, sad, knobby glory, on this occasion fashioned together and wholly made anew by the interventions of one of the most remarkable British poets of this early century. We will look back to this time and talk about Tom Jenks as a wizard and books like Streak Artefacts as magic eggs he was laying." - SJ Fowler
"This is a deeply confessional work, though the speaking subject is the hero of the Manchester bus timetable, the reader of a poetastic Percy Sledge, the exegete of the Alan Clark Diaries, or – frankly – someone who cracks his (or her) own nuts. Believe me! Don’t listen to Trevor: Google a fancy sausage. Pack a traditional English apple in your rucksack and set out over the indeterminate terrain of these fine traps and tropes. The other day I misheard somebody say ‘multiple realism’. I knew I would find a place to use that phrase. It’s here. It’s all our multiple realisms. Though only Tom Jenks can be proud of having assembled it for us." - Robert Sheppard