{"product_id":"desolate-market-book-julian-turner-9781784105129","title":"Desolate Market","description":"Julian Turner's Desolate Market takes as its tuning fork a line from William Blake's Vela, or the 4 Zoas: `Wisdom is sold in the desolate market where none come to buy.' Fascinated by the interaction of material and mystical forces, Turner sets up a series of test cases in which the power of the human imagination, and its susceptibility to quasi-mystical influence, are explored. Poems on influencing machines (mind-controlling contraptions housed in the brain, as described by some people experiencing psychosis) double as a critique of the totalitarian dreams of despots. The corrosive influence of the market economy (that other quasi-mystical force), with its power to bring about poverty, redundancy, terrorism, and alienation, is the subject of a later section of poems. The collection ends with the poet's alternative vision of the birth of the cosmos, a `disinterested machine \/ spinning its great designs of flesh and soul.'  Turner's `affecting, memorable and original' poems (TLS) were shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection with Crossing the Outskirts, and his Planet-Struck was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation. Desolate Market is his most ambitious and urgent work to date.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":49564513894673,"sku":"GOR009621593","price":6.5,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/1784105120.jpg?v=1751059079","url":"https:\/\/www.worldofbooks.com\/en-gb\/products\/desolate-market-book-julian-turner-9781784105129","provider":"World of Books ","version":"1.0","type":"link"}