Rogan Whitenails (born Martyn Sutton; 1971 in Chester, UK) is a British poet, fabulist and barotermatismophobia sufferer.

Barotermatismophobia

Combining "baro" (Greek for "gravity") and "termatismos" (meaning "to stop"), Whitenails devised the word "barotermatismophobia" to denote the hitherto undocumented fear of gravity suddenly failing to transmit its force, leading to what the poet describes as a "cataclysmic ascension", whereby everybody and everything is catapulted off the Earth's surface into outer space.

Motifs, style and imagery

Gravity giving up is the motif of much of his work, but he also writes a great deal about the town of

Woking Woking ( ) is a town and borough status in the United Kingdom, borough in northwest Surrey, England, around from central London. It appears in Domesday Book as ''Wochinges'' and its name probably derives from that of a Anglo-Saxon settlement o ...

, where he lived between 2001 and 2004. Woking's large Toys "Я" Us store and its adjoining

multi-storey car park A multistorey car park (British English, British and Singapore English) or parking garage (American English), also called a multistory, parking building, parking structure, parkade (mainly Canadian English, Canadian), parking ramp, parking ...

are featured in several of his writings. "Three people threw themselves off the top of the multi-storey car park in as many years as I was there. And the wolf-whistling, that was chilling", replied Whitenails, after he was asked in a radio interview about the town. Further motifs are empathy and apparitionism; his style often relies on paring down metaphors, mostly via rhyming couplets. He has had four idiosyncratic collections published: ''Failure Crawled up my Leg'' (1998, 2002), ''Gravity is a Babe Lost in the Wood of Ubiquity'' (2005), ''Ghostly Sightings of the Pornographic Lady'' (2008) and ''Apparitionist'' (2017).

References

External links

Rogan Whitenails's blogA review on furthernoise.org of ''The Inkblot Sudarium''An interview with Whitenails on Books, Vertigo and Tea
{{DEFAULTSORT:Whitenails British poets Fabulists Living people British male poets Year of birth missing (living people)