Author: Mark Hyatt
Editors: Sam Ladkin and Luke Roberts
Publisher: Nightboat Books
Paperback
Staff Pick! Sam says…
In his brief, tragic but beautiful life, the time given to Mark to write was briefer still. After an abusive childhood, he learned to read and write when he was thirteen. When he ended his life in the 70s, his poems were almost lost, but for the intervention of other poets who drove overnight to collect and Xerox them. Out of this small window of time, he bathes us in light. Beautiful, melancholic, wry and liltingly musical, his poems chronicle hus struggles with depression, rejection and the legacy of his childhood abuse. They also speak of boredom, horniness, curiosity, altogether of a fertile and fragile intelligence, which shone for far too short a time.