books
Mother Night, a poetry pamphlet published by the Emma Press (13th June 2024)
‘…a constellation of sensations and experiences. This chapbook announces the arrival of an immensely gifted poet.’ – Eduardo C. Corral
Mother Night is a hallucinogenic journey across a city with too many alleyways and across a life surviving childhood sexual assault. Forming a nocturnal séance, Serge ♆ Neptune resurrects abusive old lovers and ghosts of the queers of the past – conjures men in cars and men in bedrooms – providing them invitation and shelter, or casting them to stormy waves.
In a book of many types of darkness – across poems of vulnerability and harm – what persists in Mother Night is its celebration of resilience, what shines brightest is the many ways it reaches for the light.
Praise for Mother Night
‘Holding their spaces open to the unruly, the poems of Mother Night form wryly tender receptacles of the raw, queer experience. Beginning in adversity and challenge, as pills perform a “rose-gold attempt/ to ease/ a sledge-hammer thought”, we are led backwards down through layers of lovers, and predators, to the seven-year-old place where life ends, and then must restart. Creating a language to explore the long aftermath of childhood sexual abuse, Serge Neptune’s courageous, crucial work is also a song of healing and self-reclamation’ – Alice Hiller
‘Serge Neptune’s nocturnes and lyrics are audacious, undeniable, and striking. What has scarred the flesh, what has charged the flesh pulses in these poems. The language itself is visceral, deftly wrought. In Mother Night, the body is a constellation of sensations and experiences. This chapbook announces the arrival of an immensely gifted poet.’ – Eduardo C. Corral
reviews
Cartography of the Self, a review of four pamphlets including Mother Night by Livvy Hanks, in The Poetry Review volume 114:4 Winter 2024
Mother Night review in the 2024 Autumn bulletin of the Poetry Book Society by Helena Ritson
https://www.tentacularmag.com/issue-8-a/andre-bagoo
https://www.haranapoetry.com/v20-review-a-cataract-of-light
https://miingle.com/best-erotic-books-to-read-this-summer/
https://theeabsentee.com/2020/11/07/review-these-queer-merboys-by-serge-neptune/
https://eatthestorms.com/2021/01/26/these-queer-merboys-serge-neptune/
https://librarystaffpicks.wordpress.com/2020/07/06/poetry-roundup-3-january-june-2020/
praise for these queer merboys:
“In his debut chapbook, Serge ♆ Neptune cements his reputation as the Little Merman of British poetry. These are works of joyful, exuberant physicality, of metamorphosis and yearning. The poems take place in a dream-space of infatuation and memory which feels altogether alive and urgent – windows into our full complexity through a vigorously consistent central image. It is always thrilling to witness a writer finding their form and their passion – the leitmotifs you know they’re going to tap into forever, refine and make new, inexhaustible as the ocean. Serge ♆ Neptune does so here in poems that are funny, beautiful and enviably phrased and balanced. Even at their most troubled and moving they transfigure the saddest experiences into something dignified and powerful– something we can all use.” - Luke Kennard
“Rich and precise - a pamphlet that pulls you into its world, its heady mix of danger and desire, and bravely lays bare the guts, gore and beauty of being alive. These Queer Merboys broke my heart.” - Ella Frears
“Serge ♆ Neptune’s poems are alert to the blissful possibilities that queer desire unfolds as well as the challenges of living them out. Here ‘night sheds / its worm skin, its polluted armour’ but all is never quite as it seems. His mermen discover glittering surfaces but also dark, terrifying water. The tight focus of Serge’s attention, however, means his metaphors work in unison, their cumulative effect taking the reader ever deeper into a parallel universe imagined in vivid and thrilling detail.” - John McCullough
