A year on from the release of the second edition of Swansea Automatic, and eleven years after its initial publication in 2015, Rhys Trimble's first person narrative, which is both an ode to Swansea and a stream of consciousness filtered through literary exercises, is set to be released as an audiobook. The publisher of the second edition, Sulfur Editions, synopsises the text:
Herein lies not a book, but a surrealist experimental machine for surr thinking. A psychogeographic engine powered by stray thoughts, dictaphone recordings, and the radical ghost of B.S. Johnson. In Swansea Automatic, Rhys Trimble does not write about Swansea; he allows the city's sedimented unconscious to write itself through him, using a series of alchemical experiments prescribed by the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets as his volatile medium. This is a creative manual that systematically deranges the language to map a city's soul. Swansea emerges as a macromolecule of myth and memory, a liminal space of tidal moods, industrial scars, and psychic detritus. The text fractures and reassembles before your eyes-a cut-up of local history and internal monologue, a scientific textbook for a universe where logic has been disabled. What results from this hazardous process is a new form of testimony. It is the city's collective Tinder profile, swiping right on everything in its vicinity; it is a wedding vow for a final, apocalyptic hook-up; it is a logbook from a journey into the self, with Annwn the dog as psychopomp. Trimble has forged a vibrant, unstable, and utterly essential artifact - a book that is simultaneously a journey, a weapon, and a prayer, leaving the reader, like the city itself, thrillingly altered.
Swansea Automatic, which has received reviews commending Trimble's humour and risk-taking, and even dubbing him 'the most inventive young poet in Wales', is set to also be released in Cymraeg. The people of Swansea should feel urged to read, listen to, and otherwise engage in such a fascinating piece of text and rediscover your home through Trimble's lens.
