Nitrate

Cellulose nitrate was introduced in 1889, and used until the 1950s as the - frighteningly flammable - basis of film stock. Simon Perril's new book of poems is a meditation upon the birth of the moving picture, the allure of the film still, the aesthetics of the early horror film, and the contemporary intermission' that moors us out of time. Its touchstones are the chronophotographs of E.J. Marey and the cinematicessays' of film-maker Chris Marker. Marey's experiments in understanding motion inadvertently contributed to the origins of film, but also, more darkly, to the industrial management of work and time. In a book of three markedly different sections, Perril explores these connections in poems as luminous and flammable as the films to which they pay homage.