England Screaming

"what is it to be us: here and now?" …with this question, artist and poet Bruce Rimell takes the reader on a fractured but personal journey into the silent crisis of English identity, and its coopting by far-right forces since the 1970s… "what about a multivocal multiethnic Englishness?" …writing in a wired, savage voice, he marks contemporary Englishness as a stagnant, ethnically exclusive national identity far removed from modern, multicultural images of Britishness and the progressive identities of the Celtic nations… "surrounded by good examples we don’t want to hear" …riffing on the feeling that England was once dreaming, but now is almost dying to be made new again, he argues that a modern national conversation about what it is to be English in the twenty-first century is entirely possible… "I still believe it can find its way home" …part polemic, part poetics, this queer, hyperactive text leans into the absence that no one wants to see, and hopes that building a progressive Englishness can combat the rising tides of global fascism in this country… "so let’s start"