The Martian's Regress

by Morgan, J. O.

• ISBN13: 9781787332140
• ISBN10: 1787332144
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2020-09-01
• Publisher: Jonathan Cape

Summary

**SHORTLISTED FOR THE TS ELIOT PRIZE 2020**

From the winner of the Costa Poetry Award

A lone martian returns to Earth. He leaves behind him a hardened survivalist culture, its muddled myths and songs, its continued abuse of the environment that sustains it. During this journey back to the now-broken and long-abandoned mother planet, the martian begins to consider his own uncertain origins, and his own future.

Cut off from his people, the martian's story is that of the individual: his duty at odds with his desire; the race of which he's still a part playing always on his mind, as well as the race that once was. This is the story of what life becomes when stripped of all that makes it worth living - of what humans become when they lose their humanity.

The Martian's Regress is a brilliant, provocative, often darkly comic work that explores what a fragile environment eventually makes of those who persist in tampering with it.

Author Biography

J. O. Morgan lives on a small farm in the Scottish Borders. He is the author of six previous books, each a single, book-length poem: Natural Mechanical (2009), which was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection and won the Aldeburgh First Collection Prize; its sequel, Long Cuts (2011), shortlisted for the Scottish Mortgage Investment Trust Award; At Maldon (2013), shortlisted for the Saltire Society Poetry Book of the Year Award; In Casting Off (2015); Interference Pattern, which was shortlisted for the 2016 T. S. Eliot Prize; and Assurances (2018), which was shortlisted for the Forward Prize and won the Costa Poetry Award.