Friends Without Bodies
Brendan’s first collection of poetry, from Write Bloody North.
In his debut poetry collection, award-winning writer and musician Brendan McLeod tracks the Covid-19 pandemic. What began as a personal project quickly blossomed into an ambitious record of society’s new rules, moral predicaments, and emotional upheavals. First published by Write Bloody North online, where it immediately sparked conversations around the social inequalities the pandemic exploited, select poems appear here in refined form that add another level of meaning to the visceral reactions of the originals. Funny, harrowing, and compassionate, Friends Without Bodies mines the irony at the heart of the pandemic – that the greatest tool we have to protect ourselves, and others, is our own loneliness.
“Friends Without Bodies coaxes the reader to witness the truth beyond what we can still see from our windows and balconies – colours as impossible as the size of our gratitude or the shape of our forgetfulness. Quick with tenderness and compassion, humour, honesty, and unrelenting love, McLeod unveils an undeniable phenomenon, a revelation of the strange beauty of being alive.”
“For a book about a guy alone in his room at his desk, Friends Without Bodies is a lot more exciting than it has any right to be. It reads like a motion picture on a life raft; the writing acute, substantial, and unafraid. There’ll be a lot of art centered on the pandemic, but nothing like this.”
“With philosophical sharpness, Brendan McLeod’s new collection examines how the pandemic has changed our most fundamental relationships. The poems circle, looking for the obscured core of who we are and what we have become without our friends, our milestones, our habitual daily joys. It’s the companion we need as we wave at each other from a distance.”
“Friends Without Bodies captures moments in an ungovernable world, where connection is heartbreakingly fleeting or miraculous, or both. This book solved something in me. I needed this.”