The Meanwhile Sites

by Pete Green

What is a city for? How long do the vibrations persist from an economic shock wave, or a guitar chord? Is anything really permanent? The 'meanwhile site' is a place where change becomes a design feature, and Pete Green's remarkable debut collection commemorates the transient and the marginal - from the emergency housing made of shipping containers to crumbling coastal paths and sea stacks; from the villages left isolated by railway closures to the predicament of the new generations disenfranchised by the march of neoliberalism. With the temporary comes hope of renewal, though, and alternatives to a disrupted, rootless culture might emerge in a Neolithic stone circle, or a circle of friends. Keenly observed, deft and humane, these are poems for our age of precarity.

112 pages, Paperback

Published October 15, 2022

About the author

Pete Green is a poet and musician who grew up in Grimsby and has lived in Sheffield since 2004. Their preoccupations include place, identity, marginality and finitude, walking, drinking, rock and roll, and railways. Pete's first full-length collection The Meanwhile Sites is published by Salt in October 2022, while their short book Hemisphere and pamphlet Sheffield Almanac are published by Longbarrow Press. Their poetry, which has also appeared in Under the Radar, Stand, the Fenland Poetry Journal and elsewhere, has been longlisted in the 2020 National Poetry Competition and shortlisted for the 2019 Brotherton Poetry prize.

Reviews

[Goodreeds User]

I just don't think you can be cynical in a poem, I just don't think it works

[Damaged Goods]

Hi-vis indie brinkmanship.