Crowd Work is the venturous debut by writer Sam Furlong. With candour, its poems detail experiences of a body’s living, materialities it inhabits and shares with bodies and other species. Also, the qualities of pain, and the complexities and contradictions of intimacy.
From densely sculpted sonnets to capacious prose forms and ekphrasis, Furlong’s uses of image and tonal variation interweave voyeurism with masochisms and transfiguration. Devotional gestures are amplified from the private to many-voiced conversations, expressly in the sequence ‘Crowd Work’, an unflinching interrogation of the performative side of identity in stand-up’s public setting.
Radically amatory, this debut performs a body’s wanton poetries. Re-making forms, it renders explicit the means by which ‘Through breaking, we are made.’
Sam Furlong is a writer from Dublin, who works across genres. They completed an MA in Poetry at the Seamus Heaney Centre, where they were awarded the Ireland Chair of Poetry Student Award in 2023. Their writing has appeared in publications including Banshee, Abridged, Propel, Catflap, Poetry Ireland Review, and The Pig’s Back. They have been selected for the National Mentorship Programme and Poetry Ireland’s Introductions Series, and read alongside Stephen Rae and Paula Meehan at the Abbey Theatre’s Now We Must Sing: Celebrating WB Yeats.
At present, they are developing a short story collection supported by both an Agility Award and The Stinging Fly workshop scholarship and are Poetry Editor of Frustrated Writers’ Group.
Note: This purchase is of the individual book described above. If you have already become a Subscriber or Supporter of Macha Press, you have purchased this title and should not complete this order unless you would like an additional individual copy of the book.
Praise for Crowd Work
Crowd Work elicits an expansive and extraordinary cartography of the body, ‘rendered finally legible’. Here is Barthes’s jouissance, stripped bare to the bone. Furlong’s writing hurts, and is hurt. It takes your delicate face in its hands, presses it seductively against both sides of pain. It tells you where to look. What you see might save you, or break you. It cannot but change you.
- Nidhi Zak/Aria Eipe
Sam Furlong’s poems take their cue from this moment but, in their execution, are light years ahead of it. The entire range is here—the sacred and the profane, the elegant and the experimental, the experiences of loss and gain—all vying for supremacy, all at each other’s throats, until the borders between categories fail. Crowd Work is of its own category.
— Dane Holt
In the parlance of stand-up comedy, ‘crowd work’ signifies the improvisatory exchanges the comedian conducts with members of the audience, in contrast to the rehearsed material of a core set. Sam Furlong’s first collection demonstrates both the chatty insouciance of the former and the structured, iterative build of the latter. These ekphrastic and ethical meditations, narratives of transmasculine being and becoming, unsettle in the way of the most incisive stand-up: they ask you who you are, what you do, and how you got here tonight.
— Kit Fryatt
Crowd Work is the venturous debut by writer Sam Furlong. With candour, its poems detail experiences of a body’s living, materialities it inhabits and shares with bodies and other species. Also, the qualities of pain, and the complexities and contradictions of intimacy.
From densely sculpted sonnets to capacious prose forms and ekphrasis, Furlong’s uses of image and tonal variation interweave voyeurism with masochisms and transfiguration. Devotional gestures are amplified from the private to many-voiced conversations, expressly in the sequence ‘Crowd Work’, an unflinching interrogation of the performative side of identity in stand-up’s public setting.
Radically amatory, this debut performs a body’s wanton poetries. Re-making forms, it renders explicit the means by which ‘Through breaking, we are made.’
Sam Furlong is a writer from Dublin, who works across genres. They completed an MA in Poetry at the Seamus Heaney Centre, where they were awarded the Ireland Chair of Poetry Student Award in 2023. Their writing has appeared in publications including Banshee, Abridged, Propel, Catflap, Poetry Ireland Review, and The Pig’s Back. They have been selected for the National Mentorship Programme and Poetry Ireland’s Introductions Series, and read alongside Stephen Rae and Paula Meehan at the Abbey Theatre’s Now We Must Sing: Celebrating WB Yeats.
At present, they are developing a short story collection supported by both an Agility Award and The Stinging Fly workshop scholarship and are Poetry Editor of Frustrated Writers’ Group.
Note: This purchase is of the individual book described above. If you have already become a Subscriber or Supporter of Macha Press, you have purchased this title and should not complete this order unless you would like an additional individual copy of the book.
Praise for Crowd Work
Crowd Work elicits an expansive and extraordinary cartography of the body, ‘rendered finally legible’. Here is Barthes’s jouissance, stripped bare to the bone. Furlong’s writing hurts, and is hurt. It takes your delicate face in its hands, presses it seductively against both sides of pain. It tells you where to look. What you see might save you, or break you. It cannot but change you.
- Nidhi Zak/Aria Eipe
Sam Furlong’s poems take their cue from this moment but, in their execution, are light years ahead of it. The entire range is here—the sacred and the profane, the elegant and the experimental, the experiences of loss and gain—all vying for supremacy, all at each other’s throats, until the borders between categories fail. Crowd Work is of its own category.
— Dane Holt
In the parlance of stand-up comedy, ‘crowd work’ signifies the improvisatory exchanges the comedian conducts with members of the audience, in contrast to the rehearsed material of a core set. Sam Furlong’s first collection demonstrates both the chatty insouciance of the former and the structured, iterative build of the latter. These ekphrastic and ethical meditations, narratives of transmasculine being and becoming, unsettle in the way of the most incisive stand-up: they ask you who you are, what you do, and how you got here tonight.
— Kit Fryatt
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