:: Bruce Rimell - Poet Bio ::

Bruce Rimell is an internationally-exhibited visual artist and outsider poet whose literary output explores dynamics of life as a gay/Queer and hyperactive/ADHD person with a lyrical enthusiasm. He is principally a narrative poet: psycheogeographic travelogues, long-ranging inner journeys and no-filter Queer expressions bordering on the cathartic feature strongly throughout his poems.

He writes in frenetic free verse forms, as well as at times a surreal mythicism, and a fractured approach to syntax which reflects his attempts to authentically reproduce the stream-of-consciousness mental movements which characterize his experience of living with ADHD. The tone of his work dances freely between Classical (Graeco-Roman) and contemporary textures, bringing unique – and sometimes unhinged – takes on diverse themes with an outsider’s edge.

Much of his work is self-published: early works, such as ‘Ta Sba Balamil Ta Ch’ulel’, an illustrated travelogue of a journey to Mexico, sat far from the mainstreams of the literary zeitgeist. This was followed by ‘Nine Nights Awake’, a hyperactive and decentralised work, which functioned as an experimental autobiography of a Queer/ADHD inner life. Further travelogues – ‘Shapes Of Shiny Brow’ evoking Taliesin within the landscape of North Wales, and ‘Bloodhoney Songs’ reanimating the figure of Loki within the waterfalls and lava fields of Iceland – continued this unconventional approach to poetry.

More recently, however, he has begun to enter the fold of the explicable: ‘Echoes For Aphrodite’, his 2024 travelogue to the island of Milos in the Greek Cyclades, was shortlisted for the 2024 Poetry Book Awards, while ‘Deo Mithrae’, an excerpt from ‘Vallum Aelium’, a forthcoming travelogue to Hadrian’s Wall, was published as a chapbook in January 2025 by The Braag, a small-scale publishing initiative based in the UK's north-east.

Future publications will include the ‘Queeritudes’ series, narrative works from the wilder edges of Bruce’s adventurous queer life, and ‘Afterimages’, a wide-ranging reflection on turning fifty. These will become available through Xibalba Books, his publishing imprint, as he continues to seek forays into the mainstream.