Louis Cabri's first collection of poetry, The Mood Embosser, presents a series of impressions of 1990s social history as it manifested in the lingering traces of everyday life. Chunks of found language from advertising, TV, popular music and sports pop up throughout the work. Despite the deliberate disjointedness of the poetic style, large sections of this book will seem oddly familiar because Cabri is mixing and rebroadcasting the language that surrounds us in the same way that a DJ spins turntables to make dance club mixes.
Cabri's styles range from doggerel to visual poems, from long lines to 'composition by field', where words are scattered across the page. Every one of them is absolutely captivating – you'll laugh, you'll cry, you'll reconsider your politics.
In The Mood Embosser, Louis Cabri writes toward chance's margin - the home of the things we don't know - with a pointed humour. This book pokes and prods among the detritus of culture, recycling scraps in order to build politically and aesthetically challenging sculptures from the words that others have casually thrown away.