On 1st March 2018, Eyewear Publishing will launch Niall Bourke’s debut collection Did you Put The Weasels Out? An epic for an age without heroes, Did You Put The Weasels Out? is a celebration of the modern mythology that takes place in every small town. A modern update of the 8th C Gaelic saga ‘The Táin’, written in Alexander Pushkin’s fiendish ‘Onegin sonnet’, Niall Bourke takes strict form to the extreme, and turns it into a hilarious, sharp-sighted satire of ordinary people’s neuroses, indulgences and four-AM fears. Abandon your preconceptions: Bourke’s prose-poetry operatic-verse-novel breaks all the rules – while managing to keep to them at the same time. Both traditional and undeniably of our time, Did You Put The Weasels Out? is poetry that celebrates the playfulness and uncertainty of being alive.

“Sometimes, through no fault of anyone else, I find myself getting bored of knowing what to expect when I pick up a new collection. It takes a radical formal gesture to really refresh things, and that’s what I found in Niall Bourke’s Did You Put the Weasels Out? A surreal Onegin, endlessly, viciously playful, reinventing itself in every sonnet and sonnet-footnote like a linguistic Mandelbrot set. And what might have come off as a sophisticated but purely academic exercise is instead governed by a scabrous, self-effacing wit and a deep sense of love and its absurdity, which anchors every flourish into prose poetry and free verse and runs throughout the appendices and index. It’s a debut so energetic, so bursting with ideas and insistent music, it reminds you why you started writing in the first place and, whether you like it or not, that you won’t be able to stop.”                                                                                                                             – Luke Kennard

About The Author:

Niall Bourke is from Kilkenny and studied at NUI Galway. He now lives in London and graduated from the Goldsmith’s University of London Writer/Teacher MA in 2015 (with distinction) and since then has been published widely in a number of journals and magazines in the UK and Ireland. He writes both poetry and prose and has been longlisted for The Short Story Award and shortlisted for The Over The Edge New Writer Of The Year Award (2015, 2016 and 2017), The Bare Fiction Poetry Prize, The Costa Short Story Award, The Cambridge International Short Story Prize and The Melita Hume Poetry Prize for best first collection for a poet under 35. In 2017 he was one of twelve poets selected for Poetry Ireland’s Introductions Series. Did You Put The Weasels Out? is his debut collection.

Follow at @supersplurk or find out more at https://niallbourkewriter.com/