Join Eric Gregory Award winner Joe Carrick-Varty as he launches his debut poetry collection More Sky, out with Carcanet Press, who featured him in the New Poetries VIII anthology. Joe Carrick-Varty will be supported on the night by poets Eve Esfandiari-Denney and Gboyega Odubanjo who will also be reading.
‘More Sky is a remarkable and remarkably various debut collection from Eric Gregory Award winner, Joe Carrick-Varty, tracking the ways in which experience of addiction and domestic violence shape a life. Carrick-Varty approaches difficult material with great skill and poise: here we find stunning individual lyrics, with an eye for the vivid and surreal; surprising sequences which use Buddhism and Greek myth and the life of coral to refract the poems' interests; and the astonishing sixty-three page long poem 'sky doc' which meditates on suicide, and its retrospective haunting of every corner of its speaker's life.’
Joe Carrick-Varty is a British-Irish poet, writer and founding editor of bath magg. His work has appeared in the New Statesman, Granta and POETRY. He won an Eric Gregory Award in 2022. More Sky (Carcanet Press, 2023) is his debut collection.
Eve Esfandiari-Denney is a British-born Persian/Roma poet from South London. She was shortlisted for the White Review Poet’s Prize in 2020, and published My Bodies This Morning This Evening, her debut pamphlet of poetry, with Bad Betty Press in 2022.
Gboyega Odubanjo was born and raised in East London. He is the author of two poetry pamphlets, While I Yet Live (Bad Betty Press, 2019) and Aunty Uncle Poems (The Poetry Business, 2021). In 2021, he was a recipient of the Eric Gregory Award. He is an editor of bath magg and Co-Chair of Magma Poetry.
‘More Sky is a remarkable and remarkably various debut collection from Eric Gregory Award winner, Joe Carrick-Varty, tracking the ways in which experience of addiction and domestic violence shape a life. Carrick-Varty approaches difficult material with great skill and poise: here we find stunning individual lyrics, with an eye for the vivid and surreal; surprising sequences which use Buddhism and Greek myth and the life of coral to refract the poems' interests; and the astonishing sixty-three page long poem 'sky doc' which meditates on suicide, and its retrospective haunting of every corner of its speaker's life.’
Joe Carrick-Varty is a British-Irish poet, writer and founding editor of bath magg. His work has appeared in the New Statesman, Granta and POETRY. He won an Eric Gregory Award in 2022. More Sky (Carcanet Press, 2023) is his debut collection.
Eve Esfandiari-Denney is a British-born Persian/Roma poet from South London. She was shortlisted for the White Review Poet’s Prize in 2020, and published My Bodies This Morning This Evening, her debut pamphlet of poetry, with Bad Betty Press in 2022.
Gboyega Odubanjo was born and raised in East London. He is the author of two poetry pamphlets, While I Yet Live (Bad Betty Press, 2019) and Aunty Uncle Poems (The Poetry Business, 2021). In 2021, he was a recipient of the Eric Gregory Award. He is an editor of bath magg and Co-Chair of Magma Poetry.