But & Though

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What to expect

Read by the author, Jake Hawkey.

In But & Though, Jake Hawkey scrutinizes the impact of parental addiction on families, its title a nod to the language of dependency, its circles of prevarication and excuse.

Hawkey’s poems chart the loss of a father and the resilient love between siblings, and take an unflinching look at a parent–child relationship sometimes painfully inverted through alcoholism.

Hawkey’s fresh perspective and playful style introduces a vital, authentic new voice in British poetry. It will appeal also to those interested in the wider literature of addiction and the complexities of urban working-class life in Britain. Hawkey approaches these subjects from highly original and personal angles, breathing life into his characters and settings. Ultimately, we come to know a young writer attempting to ‘detach with love’ as he strides forward into his own life.

Critics Review

'Hawkey's poems are electric, buzzing with all the possibilities of language. He has much to say, and is saying it brilliantly' –
Nick Laird, winner of the Forward Prize for Poetry and author of Up Late
Here is a wonderful new voice, full of a spiky energy accompanied by a wild imagination. His language bristles with a sense of its own freshness. His working-class world is alive and quivering. A brilliant collection
Jay Parini, author of Borges and Me
A requiem to fathers, to the streets, to the estates; at times a smash in the face with a skateboard, laughing and ‘chattin breeze’. Hawkey unravels the raw truth behind grief, alcohol dependency, and family traumas, ultimately finding ‘God dwells in every man’
Roy McFarlane, author of The Healing Next Time
Hawkey writes with serious ambition: these poems are daring in their formal organisation and their political intellect. There is also a real humour here, an ironic, knowing sensibility that never gets in the way of the poems' emotional contents. Hawkey tackles difficult subjects - alcohol dependency, deprivation, and intergenerational trauma - with admirable lucidity, attuned to both their tragedy and comedy
Padraig Regan, author of the Forward Prize-shortlisted Some Integrity
'Brilliant . . . Hawkey never fails to surprise and stun the reader with his evocation of a childhood and youth spent in the long shadow of addiction. But even more than all of this, the poet takes us beyond the usual contemporary dimensions of poetry and – lyrically and with fierce beauty – addresses the great questions of how we can break best, what makes life cohere, and what it is all about. This collection moved me to tears. It is not only daring and accomplished, it is real and written by a young man who has been on a long dark journey and found himself with light in his writing hand
Sally Read, editor of 100 Great Catholic Poems
Hawkey has written a book about working class life that is worthy of any collection in a poet’s oeuvre
Proletarian Poetry

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