Book Launch! 'SOCIAL ROOM' by Andrew Barker

Join us for another awesome book launch!

Andrew Barker will be launching the third book of his ongoing poetry collections, Social Room: Modern Shakespearean Sonnets 204 – 305, in Social Room on Wednesday the 15 of October. The first two books in the collection Joyce is Not Here: 101 Modern Shakespearean Sonnets, (2016), and Orange Peel: Modern Shakespearean Sonnets 102 - 203, (2021), will be introduced too. All the collections are named from the bars in Hong Kong where the poems were first performed.

The poems contained in this third collection are cumulatively more personal, more specifically politically motivated, more revelatory of the time in which they were written and the thoughts and character of the one who constructed them than those preceding. The historically chronological Lockdown Sonnets address the dislocation of the Covid Period as experienced by the author, and his immediate family – a situation that may or may not connect to others’ experience of that time – and many poems deal with the world-wide whirligig of truth and reality being presented as options where even satirical mockery of the situation has become hard to recognize as such. There are occasional alterations to the fourteen-line iambic petametre, ABAB etc, rhymed Shakespearean sonnet form from which the collections get their name, but this is never so gratuitous or absolute that the deviation from the original template is not done for recognizable and deliberate artistic purposes. As I have said of the two previous books, I believe Social Room: Modern Shakespearean Sonnets 204 – 305 to be a revolution in content, not form, and a continuation of the exploration of what can be done with the sonnet today.

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