​​JD Howse reframes heterosexual violence for those who cannot seem to understand its impact on the real live human bodies it often destroys daily. Romeo and Juliet, a story drenched with the intoxicants of first love and vengeance, is the template, Juliet saying, ‘So the poet offers an observance of a commonplace event, in the plainest diction, without verbal trickery.’ And so, blood colors get the full effect on the conscience; this is a terrifying genius at work!

 

CAConrad, author of  You Don’t Have What It Takes To Be My Nemesis

 

An obsessive, disturbing, bodily collage that feels like an anatomical blade has been taken to the very idea of homosexual identity. Reading the work is an act of going through the guts of history, cinematic in scope and texture, as we jump from fragmented quotes, stitched together newspaper articles, lists, and sodomy trial reports. It recalls Derek Jarman at his best, a kind of exploded At Your Own Risk. I loved it.

 

Oliver Zarandi, author of Soft Fruit in the Sun

 

Somewhere between visual art and concrete poetry, lyric verse and open formal rebellion, JD Howse’s work collapses the lines between creative writing, scholarly research, art practice, and his own experiences of autism, disability, and contemporary gay life in the brutal environs of neoliberal London. This book is a masterpiece of neuroqueer literature, a harrowing journey through the shocking violence of queer history into its uncertain future.

 

Al Anderson, author of the tired angel

 

I thoroughly enjoyed Noises Again; though by ‘enjoyed’, I mean I was compelled and disturbed, as it’s rightly a deeply troubling read. There’s a strangeness and power in the play structure of the work; the ‘dialogue’ flattens out to intensify the horror of violence and aggression (micro and macro) in such a way that it’s intensely moving when Romeo and Juliet finally speak after the hole of their silence. The continuous stream of abuse, discrimination and violence allowed (shockingly) to become a ‘background’ in certain media and institutions (or even to people who come to accept its inevitability) is here brought forward to become the foreground, and the main drama playing out (shockingly in a different way!) under the spotlights.

 

Susie Campbell, author of Wastelands

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Noises Again holds together scraps of stories, news articles, overlooked statistics & discriminatory representations in a collaged bombardment of persistent oppressions against LGBTQIA+ communities. It does not “get better” in this experimental reworking of Romeo and Juliet, where trans folks are murdered, gay couples assulted and lesbians discriminated against. By rendering the romantic hero and heroine silent, Howse erases the standard heterosexual conflict from the text, instead asking us, relentlessly, to listen to the violence perpetuated against queers across the globe. But queers are also taken to task, Howse refusing to offer any hagiography gay subjects. After being offered observances of commonplace events ‘in plainest diction, without verbal trickery’, Howse ends with a poetic sequence creating ‘a song / From the ashes’ for ‘strain dying / sweet’ and ‘unspeakable comfort’. Noises Again is uncompromising and courageous, its impact coming from the refusal to turn away ‘from the nest of death’, and inviting us, along with Lady Capulet, to say ‘Enough of this’, not for want of silence, but in protest.

 

Declan Wiffen, author of indiscriminate lanking