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Saturn Devouring is a work of linguistic misdirection. Summoning from the cosmic to ground itself in damp fields and cattle sheds, Saturn Devouring searches for the heavenly within the body and the self, encountering all the grubby and sordid elements of physicality en route. Commencing with an endless night spent hunting for meaning in a Green Toyota Corolla and ending with a loss so profound it consumes everything in its wake, Saturn Devouring meets emotional intensity with maximalist image-making. Simon Costello’s poems allow no reprieve as they submerge you in their opulent, visceral, wry and hedonistic perception of things, not quite willing to confront the truth of things head on, nor capable of looking away completely. This is a work of destruction and pleasure, intimacy and pain.

‘Simon Costello's work is an utterly unique take on the lyric self in poetry. Bombastic, linguistically utterly inventive, formally adept, yet skittish, Simon combines contrary and contradicting ideas of selfhood with charged, lyric experimentations to create one of the most poignant profiles of a human I've ever seen in poetry. 

Within a mode that looks to tear itself to shreds while building something up, this is a poetry that demolishes to build. From the first line, it is as though the wind has been knocked out of you. What Simon creates is a space for challenge and difficulty (both in life and poems) to live out, and be formally replicated. The work becomes a space for generative reclamations of the self. In this way it seems to heal even as it wounds; there is not another voice like his.’ —Rachael Allen