Crowd Work by Sam Furlong

£15.99

Crowd Work is the venturous debut by writer Sam Furlong. With candour, its poems detail experiences of a body’s living, materialities it inhabits and shares with bodies and other species. Also, the qualities of pain, and the complexities and contradictions of intimacy.

From densely sculpted sonnets to capacious prose forms and ekphrasis, Furlong’s uses of image and tonal variation interweave voyeurism with masochisms and transfiguration. Devotional gestures are amplified from the private to many-voiced conversations, expressly in the sequence ‘Crowd Work’, an unflinching interrogation of the performative side of identity in stand-up’s public setting.

Radically amatory, this debut performs a body’s wanton poetries. Re-making forms, it renders explicit the means by which ‘Through breaking, we are made.’

Crowd Work is the venturous debut by writer Sam Furlong. With candour, its poems detail experiences of a body’s living, materialities it inhabits and shares with bodies and other species. Also, the qualities of pain, and the complexities and contradictions of intimacy.

From densely sculpted sonnets to capacious prose forms and ekphrasis, Furlong’s uses of image and tonal variation interweave voyeurism with masochisms and transfiguration. Devotional gestures are amplified from the private to many-voiced conversations, expressly in the sequence ‘Crowd Work’, an unflinching interrogation of the performative side of identity in stand-up’s public setting.

Radically amatory, this debut performs a body’s wanton poetries. Re-making forms, it renders explicit the means by which ‘Through breaking, we are made.’

About the Author 

Sam Furlong is a writer from Dublin, who works across genres. They completed an MA in Poetry at the Seamus Heaney Centre, where they were awarded the Ireland Chair of Poetry Student Award in 2023. Their writing has appeared in publications including Banshee, Abridged, Propel, Catflap, Poetry Ireland Review, and The Pig’s Back. They have been selected for the National Mentorship Programme and Poetry Ireland’s Introductions Series, and read alongside Stephen Rae and Paula Meehan at the Abbey Theatre’s Now We Must Sing: Celebrating WB Yeats.

At present, they are developing a short story collection supported by both an Agility Award and The Stinging Fly workshop scholarship and are Poetry Editor of Frustrated Writers’ Group.

Praise for Crowd Work

“Crowd Work elicits an expansive and extraordinary cartography of the body, ‘rendered finally legible’. Here is Barthes’s jouissance, stripped bare to the bone. Furlong’s writing hurts, and is hurt. It takes your delicate face in its hands, presses it seductively against both sides of pain. It tells you where to look. What you see might save you, or break you. It cannot but change you”

- Nidhi Zak/Aria Eipe

Publisher: Macha Press

Date Published: May 2025

Paperback, 64 pages

ISBN: 9781068769917

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