Radio Nostalgia

As palliative as a corpse in a junkyard, ...Radio Nostalgia doesn't relax you so much as it opens a way into wakefulness. With a stunning lexicon, short phrases stuffed with grit, petrol and spleen, Chris Emery orchestrates a complex, resistant music into one to three-beat lines as our 'countdown to armaments'. He refuses to look away from the tableau vivant of degradation. It is (as promised) all here for you now, he writes, a twenty-first century so wounded and blout that only the language that crawls over it shimmers with its implicit hope for transformation and redemption.

...has complex roots. The poems owe much to cinema... a distinctive sonic resonance...word music which sets his work apart. In these poems Emery has discovered a language which articulates the complex and nightmarish ramifications of the war on terror...

... language is dense and has been pared down to convey the stark nature of the world and the taut lives of the characters which people his particular wasteland. ... thrives on the binding device of this tight diction... springs the rhythm of the entire language and renders it foreign...a rather breathless feel to it... musical and expansive.

...strong, gritty and very appealing...a plainness of diction and a wry humour... witty, gracious and entertaining. ...presented with real dignity and compassion.