The Resting Acrobats

‘From left to right the painting is a sentence with a clown dropped in the middle: will the child grow up to be the clown or the acrobat?’

An imaginative exercise in the elasticity of ekphrasis, The Resting Acrobats launches, bounces and leaps through lyric space. The poems are shifting and iridescent town squares created for the voices of those in injustice: fuel shortages, impoverished thirst, broken utopias – those who lack are given abundance in Mau Baiocco’s kaleidoscopic cosmogony of hope.

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‘Mau Baiocco writes a spirited and interrogating poetry—it’s restless andasks necessary questions of self and world, and of what might really be happening around and to the speaking subject in these poems. The Resting Acrobats is a serious romp and a wonderful and gorgeous book.’

— Peter Gizzi

‘In the pliable vessels and interludes of The Resting Acrobats, Mau Baiocco imagines a poetry “totally unlike the news.” What’s audible in the silence after the state broadcast? The fool sits as a caesura in the big top’s shadows—unhoused, criminalised, insane. Mau’s ekphrastic odes, crotch’s-eye views, and staunched essay-songs twist the cynical journalism of culture, fuck up the prevailing wind, occupy the galleries and coffee tables of the kids of the Elite. There can be no exile because there can be no return.

But there is thought, passionately sinuous here, resounding against the perimeters of a tastefully regulated queerness, gnawing at the ropes of a system that wants to produce lots of competing little PCSOs. “Lyric means whatever the fuck we need.” The poems of The Resting Acrobats make a desiring music of courage, glamour, and wit.’
— Dom Hale

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Mau Baiocco is a poet and translator from Caracas, Venezuela, currently residing in the UK. They are a staff editor at SPAM Press. The Resting Acrobats is their debut pamphlet.