Max Porter's short book All of This Unreal Time takes the poetic concept of ‘perfect speech' and turns it into a wild, psycholo-delic apology rant.
What would you say if you had one ideal chance to speak yourself, to make a language that spoke across time to those you have loved, to those you have wronged, to all those countless human and non-human lives that have intersected and impacted on yours, with or without your knowledge?
Porter’s linguistic juggling moves us between and through a single speaker’s self-lacerating ‘apology’ to an excavation of family trauma, late capitalist guilt, rage and the shame that attends modern masculinity, all handled with a slipperiness where nothing is quite as it seems, even pregnant with its opposite.
This is a shape-shifting tour-de-force of voice and concept from our most exciting contemporary writer.
Foreword by Cillian Murphy.
