"Places you Leave is relentlessly energetic and politically insistent without ever being pedantic, these are knife-sharp glimpses of the world. The specificity of the details - spindling out over and again - never releases us. We're yanked along image by image, observation by observation. And, suddenly, it occurs that we're the angel going backwards with the world collapsing in our wake."
Forrest Gander
Beginning inside the largest refugee camp in the world (Cox's Bazar) and ending up with Lorca in Granada, Places You Leave explores questions of travel, place / displacement, self / otherness, race, feminism, national and global politics. Through poems, poetic sequences and the lyric essay, Byrne considers a 'poethics' of place and speaks back to the complex nature of human experience. In his most hybrid work to date, including original collages from seven different countries, Byrne advocates for activist but peaceful ways in which language might challenge existing social structures and the dynamics of power.
James Byrne is a poet, editor and translator, renowned for his commitment to international poetries and poetics. Places You Leave is his fourth collection from Arc, his previous collections being Blood / Sugar (2009), White Coins 2015) and The Caprices (2019). Also for Arc he has co-edited the anthologies Bones Will Crow: 15 Contemporary Burmese Poets (2012) with ko ko thett, Atlantic Drift (2017) with Robert Sheppard (co-published with Edge Hill University Press) and I Am a Rohingya (2019), with Shehza Doja. He is Arc's International Editor for Arc and is currently a Reader in Creative Writing at Edge Hill University.
