Stasis Shuffle

Judges' Comments

In Stasis Shuffle Pam Brown offers a minimalist poetic masterwork that arrives with a gleam in its eye. The book’s economy of style helps to expose various false economies that undergird the ‘apparent stability / of the everyday’. Insouciant and intelligent, Brown’s poetry is perfectly poised to examine those ‘plastic & tragic’ forms of consumption that mark out the hamster-wheeled experiences and artificial textures of modern life. 

Brown’s volume demonstrates an impulse toward atomisation, breaking poetry into smaller and smaller pieces: the image, the line, the word, the acronym. But even as the poems train a reader’s attention on these semantic units, the book shuffles its way along ‘digital by-ways’ and various urban landscapes, attuned to those larger forces that attempt to govern contemporary experience. This is a book filled with Brown’s ironic juxtapositions and phenomenological wit; ‘it’s insane, it’s fast/ it’s fun’.