Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2018 Winner of the Goldsmiths Prize 2018 Winner of The Roehampton Poetry Prize 2018 Winner of the 2019 Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction 'A beautiful, vigorous and achingly melancholy hymn to the ...

Generally, NUBClub liked The Long Take, but didn't love it. On the positive side, everyone who read it was moved by the beauty of some of the descriptions. The war scenes were appropriately horrifying in remarkable brevity, the city scenes painted vivid pictures of the changing landscape, and the main character's PTSD shone through some of the tight juxtapositions of these elements. Nick pointed out how the end of the poem brought the theme together beautiful -- how the destruction of Los Angeles in the name of progress was a kind of war in itself that was destroying the lives of those who witnessed it. We also felt that the reflections on the narrator's home life were weaker, and we didn't really think the love interest in the past added anything. Also, for a work billed as a narrative of poetry and pictures, there weren't many pictures in it. The pictures varied in quality, but if you're going to call your work a narrative of photos, you can't just throw a photo at the start of each chapter. Overall, it's a good work, and it got a number of us interested in reading long-form poetry again, but none of us felt it was going to be one of the best things we would read in that medium.