Leo Bussi, LIFE-SIZED
A5 size (148 x 210mm)
36pp.
RRP: £6.99
Cover art by Elisa de la Serna Gallego
Publication date: 12th March 2025
ISBN: 978-1-915049-32-2
Roll up! Roll up! The debut pamphlet from Leo Bussi is so hot it would melt mirror-polished stainless steel. In these poems you will find vibe sculptures of art's animalia pushing into the lyrical multiverse of love, friendship, objects and more.
Praise for the book:
Life-Sized balances a coy temper and meaty outlook, shared of course by its pen-mentor Jeff Koons. Pitching a makeshift tent in the wobbly nighttime of the buttocks, breaking dove shaped bread- this pamphlet exemplifies Bussi's unique love for sad love nonsense and happy love lizards, the kind from the movie Holes.’
– Connor Jones
Reading Life-Sized made me feel like I’d jumped in the deepest end of the pool.
And as you rise back to the surface, you think about all the important things in life:
Art Sex Death or Death Sex and Art, and muscular sculpture. Poetry glistens like water.
– Sue Tompkins, Life Without Buildings
Leo Bussi's debut pamphlet Life-Sized is, well, what size exactly? Three feet long, and two feet wide? 10 billion light years across? 8x10 inches, stapled? ‘A toothpaste sized dollop’?? That’s the kind of chunky thinker I found myself stubbing my attention on when reading these fresh, crisp, exceptionally alive-feeling poems. The verb 'stubbing' is accurate, I think, because it’s one I’ve nabbed from the poems themselves, but also because the ostensible objects of attention here (Jeff Koons and his works) and the objects these poems are made of (the words) share an obdurate cartoonish glossy expensive salady smoothness. Except, of course, that poems aren’t expensive, they’re cheap—cheaper than if they were free! Which is to say that they are valves between values and scales, which is also to say they are beautiful and mischievous and annoying, as Bussi is well aware: ‘my values include / fashioning small holes / in the blimp’. What I found really gripping about these poems though is that braided in with the gorgeously goofy bathos there are passages of Rilkean clarity and frankness: 'I am here in a way / I find difficult to be anywhere else / a leech to the present tense / a toe to the stub.' When I first read those lines I thought, well, who cares what else I do today.
– Oli Hazzard
About the author
Leo Bussi is a poet and art critic. He runs Waterwings, a poetry reading series based in Glasgow.
