Description
Mother Night is a hallucinogenic journey across a city with too many alleyways and across a life surviving childhood sexual assault. Forming a nocturnal séance, Serge ♆ Neptune resurrects abusive old lovers and ghosts of the queers of the past – conjures men in cars and men in bedrooms – providing them invitation and shelter, or casting them to stormy waves.
In a book of many types of darkness – across poems of vulnerability and harm – what persists in Mother Night is its celebration of resilience, what shines brightest is the many ways it reaches for the light.
Praise for Mother Night
‘Holding their spaces open to the unruly, the poems of Mother Night form wryly tender receptacles of the raw, queer experience. Beginning in adversity and challenge, as pills perform a “rose-gold attempt/ to ease/ a sledge-hammer thought”, we are led backwards down through layers of lovers, and predators, to the seven-year-old place where life ends, and then must restart. Creating a language to explore the long aftermath of childhood sexual abuse, Serge Neptune’s courageous, crucial work is also a song of healing and self-reclamation’ ~ Alice Hiller
‘Serge Neptune’s nocturnes and lyrics are audacious, undeniable, and striking. What has scarred the flesh, what has charged the flesh pulses in these poems. The language itself is visceral, deftly wrought. In Mother Night, the body is a constellation of sensations and experiences. This chapbook announces the arrival of an immensely gifted poet.’ ~ Eduardo C. Corral
“The beauty of resilience contrasts against the pain of grief after sexual assault in this powerful collection of poems.” ~ Poetry Book Society
“The process at the heart of this book, that of healing from a traumatic past and constructing an authentic self, is a continual work in progress […] Neptune conjures an atmosphere of hallucinatory unease, a sense that the supernatural is never far away” ~ Livvy Hanks, Poetry Review
“Neptune’s writing is courageous and often exhilarating… I admire how Neptune allows the reader into his work. The reader is never directed or forced to feel… Mother Night is necessarily and gloriously dark. While there are many instances of reflection and illumination, it’s in the darkness that Neptune’s resilience and hard-won truths shine out.” ~ Poetry London
