Obligate Carnivore by Stuart McPherson

Obligate Carnivore is an immaculate introduction to Stuart McPherson’s poetry. Painted in the jagged brushstrokes of wounded masculinity and childhood trauma, McPherson excavates new darkness. The haunted images – wolves, corpses, moons and abattoirs  - are not only vessels for McPherson’s poems, but form part of an internal nightmare logic, creatures of the hell McPherson is trying to escape from. Writing, which as Barthes wrote: “is the destruction of every voice, of every point of origin.”

PRAISE for Obligate Carnivore:

Stuart McPherson’s perilous mixture of vulnerability and concealment—like 90s grunge played on one of Cage’s prepared pianos—elicits emotions I didn’t know I possessed. “Something trapped within the hazelnut of its dried open eyes.” I want to crawl in among McPherson’s lines (“A concertina / of rotting cells / strung together”) and behold them, be held by them. Obligate Carnivore is a brutally gorgeous debut.

   — Jaydn DeWald, The Rosebud Variations