What to read after Hyperlove?

Hyperlove burns with frustration and fervour as Naomi Morris explores heteronormative ideals, romantic happily-ever-afters and the historical oppression of women and their right to agency and expression. Yet Hyperlove isn’t constrained to a sense of personal storytelling. In this incisive lyric essay, the creative mixes with the critical, as Morris looks to the mystics, to pop culture, to writing itself, dislocating categories of love and forming a radical and original exploration of desire as a woman.

Naomi Morris is a writer of mostly non-fiction and poetry originally from Birmingham. Her work has been published in The New Statesman, Polyester, Ache and Rookie. Naomi’s first pamphlet of poems, Earth Sign, won the 2018 Hollingworth Prize and was published by Partus and Sine Wave Peak in 2019.

‘Simmering at the lovelorn altar with Simone Weil, Angel Olsen and Instagram, Hyperlove explores the ‘Absolute Dirty Secret’ of desire’s imperative. With the assured grace of an essaying, diaristic lyric, Morris performs the swoon and sorrow of a radical longing.’

— Maria Sledmere

‘Morris is a kind of modern-day mystic – impossibly standing outside herself to lyrically interrogate our sexualities with a lucid and luminous calmness. In her terms like ‘soul’ and ‘ecstasy’ are born again.’

— Richard Scott

‘Sexy and spiritual, Hyperlove eulogises desire as self-erasure – romance is alive in these prismatic and hymnal interrogations of love and addiction, performance and fixation. Disruptive and extrasensory as a crush, Morris’ work summons us back into our own reflections.’

— Kandace Siobhan Walker

‘Hyperlove posits an assertively raw take on eros, walking the balance between control and frenzy. Naomi Morris’ voice is lubricious, winking, and at times grimly comic.’

— Alanna McArdle

‘Hyperlove is a stylish and incisive lyric essay, dislocating the categories of love, desire, compulsion and control. Morris combines frank self-analysis and deft citation to create a tactile, woozy anatomy of the crush and its intimate politics. Hot, honest and irrational.’

— Jack Underwood

‘Naomi Morris’ Hyperlove is a bouquet of challenging and intimate poems. Morris deftly plays with the definitions of ecstasy and ekstasis; unreal pleasure vs. literally standing outside oneself. The poems can be both visceral and detached, moving between therapeutic language: ‘it can be said that sex addiction is mistaking sex for God’ and dreamlike imagery: ‘I am raw/like a deer/just born’. Hyperlove is a heart-aching paen to mysticism, pop music, the internet and desire.’

— Phoebe Stuckes