Figure a Motion began in Castlefield Gallery, Manchester, at the ‘Ruth Barker & Hannah Leighton-Boyce’ exhibition. Both Barker and Leighton-Boyce deal with woman and the body, ongoing concerns of Jazmine Linklater’s writing.

At the centre of this beautiful new pamphlet is the visual poem ‘Concentric’, from which the surrounding poems spread like ripples, exploring the observer and the observed, myths and goddesses, excess and sensuality, always with the figure in motion at the centre.

Jazmine Linklater has published two previous pamphlets, Toward Passion According (Zarf, 2017) and Découper, Coller (Dock Road, 2018). She is a co-founder of the queer feminist collective, No Matter, and facilitates creative writing workshops at Manchester's Waterside Arts Centre. Jazmine works for Carcanet Press and T-Junction International Poetry Festival, and sits on the editorial board for Broken Sleep Books.

Amongst other necessities—lyric grimoire, textile phenomenology, handbook for linguistic hope— this book is a utopian analysis of the pronoun she. What could the haptic pronoun become given the vigorous refusal of binarist projection? Jazz offers some propositions: she is a provisional sculpture experimenting with the axes of scale, surface and site; she is an installation that floats and also produces electricity; like a new synthetic vitamin she is the effect of light on bodies and voices; she is sprouting origami violets; she distributes a glorious aptitude for thriving. In these texts her buoyancy compels you to accommodate newly intricate potentials for a bodily thinking. — Lisa Robertson

It weaves past, present and future together in a new feminist mythology which the reader feels in their own body, through the movement and layout of the language and text working strongly in tandem. Space is at once archetypal and ordinary: sea and garden, tomb and museum, flat with packing boxes and material for metamorphosis. The force which moves in these poems partakes of the prophetic and furious intensity of earlier writers, but this does not so much register in the voice, as provide the dynamic matrix for a cool and longterm vision. This is a book to be mulled over and, sometimes, danced. — Northern Writers’ Awards

Figure a Motion is printed on Mohawk Superfine papers
Pamphlet / 36pp + printed double endpapers / 140 x 140mm
ISBN: 978-1-916060-58-6