Aaron Kent – författare

The Working Classic is a collection of poetry, interviews, and essays with Aaron Kent. These diverse texts attempt to showcase how a gentrified creative industry routinely ignores working class voices unless that voice is an act of appropriation by a middle or upper class individual. Through a history of struggling with his own accent and upbringing, Kent showcases a working class poetics that aims to present both a reality of experience and a subversion of expectations. The interviews, essays, and reviews of Kent's work are a hostile depiction of how establishment arts attempt to set out the guidelines under which working class voices are allowed to participate, while the poems prove that working class voices can offer more than schadenfreude.This body of poems, fictional interviews and reviews sees Aaron Kent target social inequality through a shuffling of reality. The moon is arrested for non-violent protest while one defiant speaker declares 'I am sometimes a song'. The legion of alternative selves here are resourceful, prepared to 'Instrument the silence' and reveal 'the amount of light in an ending'. The results are spectacular, classism and gentrification exposed from a dynamic array of angles. Ferocious, intimate, important. - John McCullough, Panic ResponseTo wake from the simulation that seems to equate its power with surcease. Aaron Kent's The Working Classic can be nothing other than existential kinetic as neo-renewal as liberation from the class stamped rigidities of generational inbred British boundedness. -Will Alexander, Refractive AfricaA definite classic; Kent continues to find new words and new forms to peel back the layers of the self. Non-linear, unpredictable and always surprising, this is a book only Kent could conceive of , and certainly one that nobody else could write - Andrew McMillan, 100 Queer Poems (co-editor)There are books that UK poetry needs, and there are books that UK poetry deserves. Needs, like the salvation of its soul. Deserves, like a smack in the face with a Millwall brick. The Working Classic is both. It is, amongst other things, an incisive and playful engagement with what poetry is, to whom it belongs, and with the endless orgy of mind-numbing waffle that surrounds its publication and reception. It is satirically sharp, genuinely insightful, and often hilarious. More than this, Aaron Kent is a candid and nuanced chronicler of what it means to be working class in the twenty-first century. That is, to be irrevocably, painfully, and marvellously shaped by class; classed in our engagement with language and literary culture; in our encounters with each other and the world. The Working Classic is full of coruscating verbal parries, beautifully off kilter image-making, and moments of pained, serrated tenderness. It recognises and holds us, but with an eye and in a voice that is entirely its own. I don't doubt that The Working Classic will alienate and vex a number of people. It should. That's what good writing is for.– Fran Lock White/OtherFor Fans Of: J. H. Prynne, Vladimir Mayakovsky, Anthony Anaxagorou

"This poetical collection, Angels the Size of Houses (70-plus sheets of cool and frantic paginated speech) is a buzzing and hyper-inventive set of multifarious devices, with exceptional prosodical hazardry and multiple re-echoes along its spacious corridors - with many doorways for we and us open to its flaring physiological recitatives. The passage construction is familial and domestic in tone-row, while also widely outlandish, saltarello-style and stylish also with it. There are culinary hints and self-displays in great lexical abundance to whet the whistle, with phantasm and modest astonishments in witty comedy, escaping grandeur but never remote from scalar enlargements, often wisely gnomic, gazing out of the window at continental drift and its markings. William Burroughs is reported to have replied, when asked his opinion about death, 'well it's a step in the right direction', obsequious in full funeral rigout, laburnum decor, with many choice aromas and childhood joys. Indeed alongside outbreaks of passionate attachment with parents and kids, the schedule is mostly immune to current political conflagrations and their drear localisms. The protocols display exceptional narrative candour, own-brand, also in white, offering vagaries of choice oddity, medical and arctic in well-tempered rational diffusion; anatomical by alternating reduction and upfront funny by marginal exploits; work and glancing damage on all sides, broken and 'racing to the bottom', where else.Reading along and across these pages is unquestionable adventurism, rapid eye movements seem to catch up with and overrun occupational impatience, as dear reader in friendship you soon enough shall find out." -J.H. Prynne"Every poem is a dizzy word-dazzle, a dance of images, expressing a real life of work, babies, love and loss. Some are shaped by word-music. Some scatter the page and the mind, stretching poetry to its limits, and leave me wondering. No bad thing." -Gillian Clarke"Poetry that vibrates on its own frequency, and invites the reader into its own surreal soundscapes. Here, new connections of language make us see the world afresh, and ask the reader to tune in to the long-held notes of truth just beneath the surface" -Andrew McMillan"Here, in this beautiful book, is the poetry of the possible. With words that are 'heaven sent and glitter prone', Aaron takes us on a journey that is as vital as it is extravagant, urging us into the fantastic, and turning our everyday scenes into glittering vistas. It is a collection to be dipped into again and again, one that leaps with language, and lends its readers fresh eyes." -Theophilus Kwek