Archaeological excavations of a ‘heritage’ Saxon burial ground are staged in The Sleeping Place as provisional assemblages of language and visual collage out of whose layers of complexity and insistent patterning the reader is invited to re-assemble the past as creative event. Bones, beads, chalk burials and other material traces of an unstable past become moving pieces in an elaborate word-game in a bid to deconstruct the violent, nationalist myth of a white Anglo-Saxon ‘originary’. Ritual, nonsense and the unmooring of grammatical co-ordinates are brought to bear on the text’s use of conceptual constraint to regain disruptive energies dispelled by conventional language use, and to re-call, through their echoes and absences, those mysteries of mortality initially banished from the text by its procedural response to human burial.

The Sleeping Place is Susie Campbell’s second book with Guillemot Press, following Tenter in 2020, which began the collaboration with Rose Ferraby. Her work has also appeared in journals, anthologies and exhibitions, as well as in the pamphlet Enclosures (Osmosis, 2021). Susie is working on a poetry practice-based PhD at Oxford Brookes.

The Sleeping Place has been illustrated by artist and archaeologist Rose Ferraby. Rose has been commissioned by the British Museum, and the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology in Cambridge, and her writing has appeared on BBC Radio 3 and Radio 4. She is co-director of the Aldborough Roman Town Project and a regular Guillemot collaborator, working not only with Susie Campbell but also with Melanie Challenger on The Tender Map (winner of the Michael Marks Award for Illustration) and with Katrina Porteous and Phoebe Power on Sea Change.

ISBN 978-1-913749-35-4 / 56 pp / 195 x 130mm / 196 x 130mm / Made with Tintoretto Gesso and Arena stocks from Fedrigoni, with Extract from GF Smith.
Illustrated bookling