Three boundary-pushing poets discuss breaking the binary, finding fearlessness, and leaning into love, lust, and life itself.
Sex, loss, gender, the Internet – nothing is off the table for these three fearless poets. Though their new collections explore everything from ecology to technology to postcolonial legacy, underscoring them all is a zest for life and an eagerness to find moments of empathy and ecstasy.
In Rapture’s Road, Hewitt’s lyrical style and sense of the sacred combine to create a work shot through with yearning, secrets, tenderness, and reawakening. Reflecting on regeneration, reawakening, and the natural world, this sophomore collection is ‘a hide and seek of the self’ (Observer).
Bright Fear, also a second collection, sees Chan taking on themes of identity, multilingualism, queerphobia, and anti-Asian racism. But at the heart of it all, there remains tenderness, beauty, and an unshakable love for the healing power of the poetic form.
Challenging and subversive, Them! is Giles’ dynamic and highly visual exploration of trans life in the modern world. Exploring the space between the ‘online’ and the ‘outside’, these poems crackle with wit, fury, and honesty.
Seán Hewitt is the author of the poetry collection Tongues of Fire, which received the Laurel Prize and was shortlisted for many awards, including the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award. His memoir, All Down Darkness Wide, was shortlisted for Biography of the Year at the An Post Irish Book Awards and for the Foyles Non-Fiction Book of the Year, and longlisted for the RSL Ondaatje Prize and the Polari Book Prize.
Mary Jean Chan is the author of Flèche, which won the Costa Book Award for Poetry and was shortlisted for multiple prizes, including the International Dylan Thomas Prize and the Seamus Heaney Centre First Collection Poetry Prize. Bright Fear, was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Collection and is currently shortlisted for the Writers’ Prize.
Harry Josephine Giles is a writer and performer. Her verse novel Deep Wheel Orcadia received the 2022 Arthur C. Clarke Award for Science Fiction Book of the Year. Her poetry collections – Tonguit and The Games – were shortlisted for the Edwin Morgan Poetry Award, the Forward Prize for Best First Collection, and the Saltire Poetry Book of the Year.
This event will be chaired by Mark Ward, author of the collection Nightlight. His latest chapbook is the interactive branching sonnet, Faultlines. He is the founding editor of Impossible Archetype, an international journal of LGBTQ+ poetry, now in its eighth year.
Presented with support from Scottish Books International.