POET’S PROSE #2
For the next instalment of Poet’s Prose sequence (a series of events celebrating cross-disciplinary efforts by radical anglophone poets experimenting outside of the traditional lyric form) we welcome to Housmans the inimitable Luke Roberts, who will be reading from his new book of essays, aphorisms, contemplations, Bad Omens.

Drawn from a decade’s worth of notebooks and journals, Bad Omens is a lyrical narrative of art and grief in a time of crisis. From London’s pollen-covered streets to wildfires in Idaho, gravesides in Paris to the Blackpool seafront, we greet a landscape of lost causes, unreasonable demands, and utopian horizons. It’s ‘the part of the century where we’re losing our grip’, and someone somewhere is owed an explanation.

Bad Omens struggles towards a poetics of beauty and debris, everything worth saving sung through gritted teeth.

Luke Roberts was born in 1987 and grew up in North Wales and the North of England. He is the author of many books and chapbooks of poetry, including Beginning to End (Nightboat, 2027), Home Radio (the87press, 2021), and Glacial Decoys (Free Poetry, 2021). His critical writing includes Living in History: Poetry in Britain, 1945-1979 (Edinburgh University Press, 2024), and Barry MacSweeney and the Politics of Post-War British Poetry (Palgrave, 2017). As an editor, he has contributed to a number of archival projects, most recently: Quintets by Iliassa Sequin (Winter Editions, 2026); Saborami: An Expanded Facsimile Edition by Cecilia Vicuña (Book Works, 2024); and So Much For Life: Selected Poems by Mark Hyatt (Nightboat, 2023). With Amy Tobin he runs the small press Distance No Object. He lives in London.

PRAISE FOR BAD OMENS:

‘Reading Luke Roberts’ book, a memory of having lunch with Etel Adnan, in Boulder, beneath a tree the colour of butterscotch, returns. There’s a golden thread, I sometimes think, that links all poets.  Sometimes it drops on the floor, sometimes we pick it up.  Sometimes we cut it in half with a pair of sewing scissors.  Sometimes it snags on a jagged landscape.  Sometimes we have to weave it from scratch.’– Bhanu Kapil, author of How To Wash A Heart

‘I often turn to Luke Roberts for ideas. So it’s reassuring to turn to him here and find him looking around too, piecing things together, pulling them up, bringing something back into focus before it’s lost, setting things side by side, recovering days, observing his attention without time’s now ineffective analysis. Keeping track is hard, holding things together is hurting and confusing; I’ll keep turning to him for more. And while I’m here, how excellent to have Book Works and Luke Roberts in the same place!’ – Holly Pester, author of The Lodgers

‘Bad Omens is difficult to characterise: part narrative; part lyric; part poetics; part elegy; part interpretation of dreams; part clowning around, it constructs the form it requires. Luke Roberts addresses his wounds and ours with anger and grace, constructing memorials to losses private and collective and, in doing so, reminding us of the total permeability of the boundaries between the two. I loved it.’ – Helen Charman, author of Mother State

‘Alongside everyone else, I’m confounded by immiseration, war, and ecological crisis, and somehow Bad Omens makes me glad to be in the world, helps me to recognise what it means to be here, through its sublime descriptions that never condescend to silver linings or the mere affects of transformation.’ – Nisha Ramayya, author of States of the Body Produced by Love

‘Seductively spiky, witty and tender, Bad Omens is a deeply affecting notation of the texture of life lived. It wrestles with and flourishes in difficulty, spinning grief into a search for something like song. Luke Roberts’ prose is a trail that always leads back to the poem, whose fragments stutter into chorus and whose ‘I’ draws a collective around itself.’ – Daisy Lafarge, author of Paul  

Please note this is a free event but please do book ahead. You can also reserve a copy of the book ahead of the event.

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