Fresh Failure by John Tottenham

Softcover with French flaps, 96 pages
5 in. x 7 in. | 127 mm. x 177.8 mm.

Fresh Failure is the eagerly anticipated—by a knowing few—new volume of poetry by John Tottenham, whose previous slender collections, The Hate Poems; Antiepithalamia & Other Poems of Regret and Resentment; and The Inertia Variations, have led to him being described as “our preeminent contemporary poète maudit.”

Fresh Failure features a deepening and broadening of Tottenham’s trademark Magical Cynicism and Magnanimous Misanthropy. With hilariously ruthless ruminations on the artistic ego and the romantic id, he gives voice to the kind of thoughts most people prefer not to express but will automatically relate to and be entertained by. It is the kind of poetry accessible to people who don’t read poetry, i.e. everybody. Fresh Failure is ultimately a Triumph of Failure, and proves, as Jean-Luc Godard once remarked, that poetry really is “a game of loser takes all."

Book Design by Sabrina Che

Cover design by Matt Dorfman