Weds 11 May, 6.30 pm, free
Join us to celebrate the publication of Out for Air by Olly Todd, with readings from Olly and special guest Sam Buchan-Watts,
Infused with movement, surprise and play, Out for Air presents a unique vision of the built environment, celebrating places where ‘the bridges are endless / beyond the cantilever / of reality’. Each poem is its own event: expansive in scope but intricate in form, a masterclass in precision engineering. Todd rewires T. S. Eliot’s Waste Land in his strange, compelling descriptions of the modern city: melting asphalt; a U-turning taxi; a diner swallowed by a sinkhole. In this disorientating landscape the skateboarder-poet is genius loci, the spirit of the place.
From Manhattan’s ‘silky streets’ and the Pacific Coast Highway to inner-city London and his native Cumbria, together these poems record a life lived on the move, in motion, on the cusp of things.