CHRISTOPHER CRAWFORD | EDITOR

Divorcee Disco Music, the debut collection by Christopher Crawford, lays bare the fractures and fissures within contemporary relationships and in the sensibilities with which we’ve sought to understand the world, society, nature, and the people who come close to us. Crawford’s poems present a stark and disquieting worldview in a fresh and unique voice — all underpinned by an imagination that both challenges and disturbs.

“These poems come heavily armed, ready to both unsettle and illuminate. It’s a wide-eyed collection with steaming guts that glisten in the headlights. Crawford’s work often leaves me in awe and a little shaken — it’s that masterfully crafted, that alive.” 

—Bobby Parker

“Christopher Crawford’s exquisite poetry collection, Divorcee Disco Music, unfolds like a corridor of brightly lit funhouse mirrors that cast back visions of loss and grief and love as they are elongated and twisted by time. Oil fields haunt these pages, as does the North Sea, ‘a long black muscle / unspooling itself,’ beckoning us ‘to know the home of the dark waves / and to go there.’ Many of these poems bring a sweetly melancholy, poignantly surreal world to life where ‘trams softly crack their / knuckles over the tracks,’ and a table ‘kneels now — uncovered —/ in a room lit with laughter, // surrounded by the broken pieces / of all it tried to lift.’ Crawford is a poet who is willing to look, without recoiling, at complicity, to reckon with the accidental violences we inflict one upon the other and still to go on singing, ‘breathing in and out behind the darkness like a jazz singer, / her lips on the mic.’”

—Francesca Bell