*Ticket (£6) includes refreshments & 10% off the author's book. 20 capacity, seated & accessible. Some tickets are allocated as PWYC starting at £0.00: please select this option if you need to do so*

Tottering State: Poetry for Unsteady Times. Readings & Q&A featuring the best in experimental, small press & innovative poetry from the UK & beyond.

The fifth instalment of Tottering State takes the pulse of contemporary radical poetry with Bristol launches of three vital new chapbooks: Fred Carter's *Outages* (Veer2), Nell Osborne's *Thank You for Everything* (Monitor Books), and Francis Jones' *Storm Drain* (Veer2). The readings will be followed by a relaxed Q&A and signing.

On *Thank You for Everything*:

Nell Osborne’s *Thank You For Everything* is a collection of poems, appointments, wiggle rooms, self-help guides, dialogue scraps, and misery chambers. It skewers the idea of the ‘poet’s voice’ with drab ease, and then skewers that. By turns oblique, seductive, and silly, here is a melancomic portrait of existence in 2024/5.

"If like Freud’s idea of hysteria – itself dead in the water – behind every symptom is a hidden pain, so too for poetry: its lyric self-seriousness and verbiage, failed addresses so often repurposed from the corporate and platform voices that shape civic emotion, its ‘personals’ and ‘personalities’. Thank You For Everything is an act of love for poetry, Nell Osborne going in slantways, ripping and rippling through “tilling sulky cockle shoals” to circle what remains, making me laugh, so much – I love the poems tuning in and out of these voices, written by a rare and liberatory mind."
— Lucy Mercer

"I hate poetry that smirks as it re-describes the administered world, all that alienation wrapped up in rictus dayglo. But Nell Osborne makes wisdom blush and wit look like slapstick, and it all seems possible, scuffed and crude and stinging. “writing is for staying insufferable.” And don't you forget it."
— Luke Roberts

On *Outages*:

"Salty in syntax circuitry, we wade knee-deep through the siloes of labour, testing our pH for presenteeism. If the very flow of blood to and from the heart is grown over with errant value, pleading by the beat of shelf life, what grasses us to the boss but life itself? I am that wilting shrub. Refusal is the power cut as praxis. All rise from moulding tenements; love your friends; invoice for the rest you are owed: ‘hard / relate.’"
— Maria Sledmere

"These poems make we want to write too; a proud thief also, an exasperated user of words that sometimes feel useless as dead leaves. But I want to compost, decompose. I sympathise in sweaty clarity — poems clenched one hand over the mucky other; Jacob's ladders where every rusted hinge sings a particular and unexpected song."
— Gloria Dawson

"Poets who have learned to say yes even though they don’t believe it have a lot to answer for. The reinflation of dead hopes and diminished expectancies has become the definition of a lot of ‘political poetry’ and perhaps simply politics altogether. Poets who say no both to what they do believe (to exist) and to what they don’t seem by contrast to put themselves into an impossible position, to make their poems into a ‘clutch game’ of residual possibility, in which they attempt, with the most minimal means (musical, cognitive, conceptual), to make the exhaustion they both believe in and feel into something other than itself. When they come, the ascents are themselves minimal, almost imperceptible. But why ascend? What we want is poems that fight for everything in a new form, on the diminished material basis that we both exist in and are: when it comes, it won’t go over anyone’s heads. *Outages* describes it like this: ‘a flightless bird spewing love into the mouth of another bird, as clear as any way / I know to describe poetry as work.’ Poems to encounter at eye-level: alongside and with."
— Danny Hayward

About the poets:

Fred Carter works and organises in Glasgow. Recent poetry is circulating in Still Point and LUDD GANG, and his pamphlet Outages is out with Veer2. He is one part of the occasional reading and print series JUST NOT.

Nell Osborne published her first poetry pamphlet, The Canine Redeemer Has Entered The Bungalow, in 2021 with Just Not. Her most recent pamphlet Thank You For Everything, is published by Monitor Books - described as a melancomic collection of poems, appointments, wiggle rooms, self-help guides, dialogue scraps, and misery chambers. From 2018-2020, Nell co-ran the experimental poetry commission series, No Matter, based in Manchester. She is also working on a non-fiction book about solitary, secret & covert modes of art-making and inarticulacy.

Francis Jones is an Irish writer and poet, who has previously written the collection sacrificial fabric (SPAM 2021) The Thieves, a text in collaboration with artist Josie Perry (CCA Intermedia Program, 2024) as well as a poem-film with Jack Hogan “I Thought I Hated U Moon Snail” which has been screened in various places in New York, Dublin and Limerick. Their second pamphlet STORM DRAIN is forthcoming with Veer2. They live in London.

Entry requirements: no age restrictions (under 18s to be accompanied by an adult over 21yrs, 1:1 ratio) — Read more — Read less