Thursday 25th July
6:30-9pm
Doors open 6:30pm for 7pm start.
Join us to celebrate the launch of Lorcán Black’s new Poetry Book Society recommended collection Strange Husbandry with a night of poetry and celebration.
Lorcán Black’s brilliant new collection Strange Husbandry contrasts modern-day stories of queer passion with older stories from myth and history. The title references not just husbandry in farming of crops and animals, but a more personal rendering of the word, calling on its etymology, meaning to manage carefully. Strange Husbandry is rooted in the city of London during the years of the COVID-19 pandemic and the beginning of war in Ukraine, a strange moment in the metropolis characterised by lockdown, missing persons and terror attacks. Without minimising the cruelness and hurt of worlds, modern and historical, Strange Husbandry suggests the possibility nevertheless of a queer quality of care which acknowledges the pain and precariousness that exist in both personal stories and external conflicts.
All welcome. We hope to see you there!
‘Through pandemic isolation and upheaval; through the glitter and gutters of London; through spectral exes and specular new love; through the guts of night, the self, Tori Amos, and the moon, Strange Husbandry sings.’ – Chen Chen
‘Black is a poet whose name we will remember for a long time.’ – Kailey Tedesco
‘Strange Husbandry is a collection alert to beauty and to terror.’ – Richie Hofmann
‘These urgent poems are warnings, confessions, declarations, and blessings. I feel them, sensorial and lyric, within my own body.’ – Blas Falconer