Hotel is the debut pamphlet by Ali Lewis
Blood is washed off a car, the earth is packed away, relationships fracture and mend.
This striking debut pamphlet from Eric Gregory Award winner Ali Lewis is a book of both close focus and great expansion. We zoom in on a snowflake’s edge and a freckled wrist, and at the same time witness the continents merge and the universe expand into something unknowable.
In a collection that contends with the seeming inevitability of masculinity, of grief, and of people moving apart, Hotel puts a glass to the walls between rooms so we might overhear.
Buy the book from Verve Poetry Press.
Read reviews from the Poetry School, Ambit, London Grip and Sphinx.
“Intimate, ludic and formally adroit, Ali Lewis’s Hotel is populated by poems that unfold as small, infinitely mirrored rooms. There are acres of carpet, on which knees might be burnt; there are snatches of conversation, tantalising and overheard. A taut, intelligent and politically alert début that speaks to what it means to be human in our increasingly complex, pressurised world.”
“I could imagine Ali Lewis as a philosopher, an architect, a mathematician, an inventor — such is the multifaceted intelligence that shines on these witty and emotionally attuned poems. Implausibly excellent, Hotel marks the debut of an exceptional new talent.”
“It is this oddball delight in language – its puns, plays, and ploys – paired with Lewis’s Stanley-knife-sharp wit and ability to sculpt taut narratives, that makes Hotel a memorable calling-card.”
“Wonderfully off-kilter, this witty, sometimes dark collection depicts the absurd in the everyday, the sudden upsetting of what is considered normal. ”