Marcus Slease: Poet and Author of The Green Monk

Marcus Slease is a Northern Irish-born poet and writer whose books include The Green Monk, Play Yr Kardz Right, The Spirit of the Bathtub, Rides, Hello Tiny Bird Brain, and Godzenie. His writing is shaped by surreal humor, abrupt association, travel, popular culture, and an international life lived across Europe, Asia, and the United States.

Slease belongs among contemporary poets whose work lets absurdity and lyric feeling occupy the same space. His poems can move from ordinary objects into dream logic, comic distortion, spiritual speculation, or sudden emotional exposure.

The Green Monk

The Green Monk, published by Boiler House Press in 2018, gathers Slease’s interest in wandering attention, surreal image, humor, and the unstable boundaries between daily life and imaginative transformation.

The book reflects a poetics in which strange conjunctions remain emotionally legible. An image can be comic and unsettling at once, while a casual voice can carry philosophical or spiritual pressure.

Play Yr Kardz Right

Play Yr Kardz Right, published by Dostoyevsky Wannabe in 2017, uses compressed lyric forms, cultural reference, repetition, and comic disruption. The title’s altered spelling signals Slease’s interest in language as a flexible material whose surface can be bent without losing immediacy.

The Spirit of the Bathtub

The Spirit of the Bathtub, published in 2018, extends Slease’s absurdist and surreal imagination through poems attentive to domestic objects, private rituals, desire, anxiety, and the comic instability of ordinary life.

Readers interested in poetry that uses unexpected association, fractured logic, and tonal leaps can continue through experimental poetry.

Travel and place

Slease was born in Portadown, Northern Ireland, and has lived in several countries, including Turkey, Poland, Italy, South Korea, the United States, Spain, and the United Kingdom. That movement informs a literary world in which place is often provisional and identity remains open to revision.

Travel enters the work through cities, languages, transit, temporary homes, and the disorientation of moving among cultural settings. The poems frequently preserve the immediacy of encounter rather than turning travel into stable autobiography.

Sound, performance, and collaboration

Slease’s practice also extends into performance and collaboration. Never Mind the Beasts, created with musician Stephen Emmerson, brings spoken language into contact with sound and music, expanding the poem beyond the printed page.

His collaborative books and performances place him within a wider field of modern poetry where writing moves easily among publication, performance, music, and visual culture.

Publication and recognition

Slease’s writing has appeared in journals including Poetry, Tin House, and Fence, and was included in Best British Poetry 2015. His work has also been translated into other languages and presented through international poetry platforms.