Carcanet online book launch: Why Are You Shouting? by James Womack

To celebrate the launch of Why Are You Shouting?, James Womack will be reading from the new Carcanet book and chatting to fellow poet and translator Sasha Dugdale at this online event.

Why Are You Shouting? is James Womack‘s fourth collection with the Manchester-based press. In it, he thinks about two things in particular: our struggle as individuals to find connections between ourselves, with friends, family and lovers, and the efforts we make as groups to connect to the environment we live and die in. Written in the shadow of the climate crisis and the pandemic years –and with the ghost of Cassandra, the Trojan princess given the gift of prophecy but condemned to have no one believe her words, haunting the collection – the poems set out to find points of hope and solidarity, against a common backdrop of disruption and collapse to which we are often wilfully blind.

A bit more blurb: Alongside these concerns runs a narrative of personal blindness and self-enchantment, a willingness to allow oneself to be misled in order to have a quiet life. If the collection’s title suggests that raising one’s voice is the readiest way to reach other people, the poems themselves dare to offer quieter solutions, too: there is space for humour and kindness, even a degree of positive thinking about the state the world is in.

Born in 1979, Cambridge-based James Womack’s Why Are You Shouting? follows three previous collections of poetry with Carcanet: Misprint (2012), On Trust: A Book of Lies (2017) and Homunculus (2020). He is also an award-winning translator, and has translated widely from Spanish and Russian, including works by Vladimir Mayakovsky, Aleksandr Tvardovsky, Manuel Vilas and Camilo José Cela.

Sasha Dugdale has published six collections with Carcanet, most recently, in May, The Strongbox. Her fifth collection, Deformations, was shortlisted for the 2020 TS Eliot Prize and Derek Walcott Prize. Joy (2017) was a Poetry Book Society Choice and the title poem was awarded the Forward Prize for Best Single Poem in 2016. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and former editor of Modern Poetry in Translation. She translates for theatre and she has published numerous translations of Russian-language women’s writing. The most recent of these, Maria Stepanova’s novel In Memory of Memory (Fitzcarraldo, 2021), was shortlisted for the International Booker Prize, the Weidenfeld Prize, Warwick Prize for Women in Translation and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize. Dugdale won the MLA Lois Roth Award for this translation.

As always with Carcanet Press events, extracts of the text will be shown during the reading so that you can read along, and audience members will have the opportunity to ask their own questions. Registration for this online event is £2, redeemable against the cost of the book – attendees will receive a discount code and details of how to get hold of the new book during and after the event.