On Trust ─ A Book of Lies

On Trust: A Book of Lies, James Womack’s second collection of poems, is organised around the notion of telling the truth. Working against ideas of poetry as a vehicle for displaying individual truths or unprocessed confessions, these poems play hilariously, earnestly, undecidedly, with such simple identifications as the ‘I’ of a poem with the ‘I’ of the poet, offering us monologues which seem to be sincere, unvarnished accounts of things that have ‘really’ happened, but which twist and escape any absolute statements of identity. Serious questions of being and belonging, as well as frivolous themes such as the Marquis de Sade, Siberia, genitals, the Fates, and death, are picked up in play, prodded at, then put down in new and sparkling configurations.

James Womack was born in 1979. He studied Russian, English and translation at university, and after living in Madrid for a decade now works as an editor, teacher and freelance translator in Cambridge. He has translated widely, including self-help books, popular fiction, Latin American classics and poetry. His first book of poems, Misprint, came out in 2012, and his book of versions ‘Vladimir Mayakovsky’ and Other Poems appeared in 2016, both from Carcanet.