Selected Poems 2013-2026

Aaron Kent's poems break mid-sentence. One clause starts, another finishes it, and what comes out of the join is usually grief, class, or a joke told at the worst possible moment. Selected Poems draws on thirteen years of work. The poems move between the tin coast of west Cornwall and a hospital ward at three in the morning, between night terrors and the ordinary things that carry on regardless. Kent writes trees rooted in the throat, a hole in the moon the size of a mechanic, a raccoon watching over a coma, ensuring surrealism has, at its core, a political edge. Throughout, threads of sleeplessness and fatherhood persevere, with his children arriving in these poems as luck, as terror, as the reason to keep count of the small moons of Saturn. He elegises without solemnity and argues politics at conversational volume. There is nobody else in Britain writing like this.