Opened Ribs are a Church Full of Sky

by Andrew Hykel Mears
Cover art by William Curtis (1790)

FROM THE ADAM GNADE

I’m very honored and happy to have helped my publisher, Bread & Roses Press, put together this chapbook of Andrew Mears’ writing. Andrew is someone I’ve known and loved for ages. We spent years in tour vans in the UK and I count him as one of the brightest stars in our increasingly dark sky. Andrew’s writing is visual, propulsive, and smart. He writes like the oldest soul around yet never ages a day and for this I’m certain he’s a vampire. (But the good kind. The type of vampire you don’t want to kill. Instead, you want to [and should] read everything the guy’s written.) He’s somewhere between Joyce and some lost Romantic-era poet you’ve never read because while the rest were writing about lakes he went off and lived with the witches. Profound, funny, important, real, insanely free of bullshit. All power like a rising sun. Heavy like a snowcapped mountain. Fun like the party you wish you were brave enough to attend.

Saddle-stitched chapbook
Linen covers, cream interiors, screenprinted slipcase, illustrated by Andrew’s great-great-great grandmother, Helen Groom (circa 1855-1880)

Zine | 24 pages | Bread & Roses Press | 2024

Andrew Hykel Mears poetry has been published by PN Review, Propel Magazine, Tears in the Fence, The Oxonian Review, Pariah Press, Anthropocene Poetry, and elsewhere. He is a Practice as Research PhD candidate at LHU. Researching poetry’s potential as a climate action tool, he is developing principles of Ambient Eco-Poetics to articulate the reciprocal, more-than-human world to which we belong. His research interests include uncertainty as a field of meaning, anti-capitalism, non-standard conceptions of time, anarchism, posthumanism, and sensuous experience as ways of knowing. He has taken part in a range of projects across disciplines, staging exhibitions and workshops at Modern Art Oxford, Leeds Festival and the Moulin Rouge (Paris), as well as participating in performances for Oxford University Poetry Society, Bath Literature Festival, All Tomorrow’s Parties, British Anthems (Tokyo), and Cambridge Film Festival, among others. As a musician, he’s composed for contemporary dance, performed improvised film soundtracks at the ICA, and backed poet & rapper, Saul Williams, author & musician Adam Gnade, and Can’s Damo Suzuki. He was a founding member of the bands Youthmovie Soundtrack Strategies and Foals. He is the managing editor of Ambient Receiver.