Is That a Bruise or a Tattoo? (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9781848612945)

Sean Burn's third full-length poetry collection ranges across poems on the great punk collage artist Linder, on the little-known Cumbrian sculptor / painter Lorna Graves and a moving tribute to the incredible Tuvan singer Sainkho Namchylak. He explores man's impact on the Lake District and there is also an excoriating poem on water privatisation. He gives us a week of prose-poetry fairytales from the Czech Republic and a further cycle on scarring. Bastille's Englan is a forceful multivoiced psychiatric hospital break-out based on the author's own history. There are further long poems on dance, on Coventry, on America under Bill Clinton and on the state of Europe over the past decade. The book finishes with the title poem which is an intense transgender love story.