The Sea is Spread and Cleaved and Furled

The sea is spread and cleaved and furled is an interdisciplinary book and film-work by poet and visual artist Ahren Warner. It is a sequence of lyric poems, a narrative, voice-over and compendium of notes-to-the-self. Written and filmed across thirteen countries, from the Greek Islands to South East Asia to the Black Sea, the Balkans and the Baltic, it is at once a travelogue and an exploration of stagnating memory, of mental fracturing and its corollary: the exuberant performance of the self. It is both a love poem, an intermedia obsession with *cats*, and the personal and philosophical exploration of alienation, moving from Andrew Marvell to Cardi B, from Foucault and Back to the Future to the inane and repetitive close reading of Drake. The sea is spread and cleaved and furled is a poem and a film about the veneer of dialogue, narcissism and pleasure, about contemporary economies of capital, human movement and desire, and the resistance of the sensible or affective world to language itself.