BILLY RAMSELL was born in Cork in 1977 and educated at the North Monastery and UCC. He began writng seriously in 2000 when he moved to Barcelona. In 2005 he was shortlisted for a Hennessy award and his poems have appeared in various publications. He lives in Cork where he co-runs an eduational publishing company. The poems in Complicated Pleasures exist on the border between the personal and the political, combining delicately lyrical meditations on love, art and memory with darker works that confront full-on the pressures and uncertainties of an urban globalised world. Wide in range, diverse and energetic in their forms, these poems seek to strike a balance between expression and exploration. They attempt to stake out a 'personal space' in a violent world of systems, machines and twenty-four hour surveillance where privacy, language and even memory itself are under permanent threat. Complicated Pleasures is a first collection of considerable daring and undeniable accomplishment