Bøker av Liam Bates

Human Townsperson, the debut collection by Liam Bates, centres around a heroic quest. The hero? Somebody. The quest's objective? Unsure. Utilising Bates' engaging and absurd poetics, Human Townsperson follows the journey of a poet leaving town bearing gear and supplies: a pack full of fantastic weaponry, potions and prescription medication. The work will be precarious and the costs grave, but out in the wilderness for long enough, maybe we'll remember why we're here.

In Monomaniac Liam Bates monopolises the prefix mono, each title beginning there, and though the titles are monomorphic the poems are anything but, always offering acute detail and humour. Bates writes with an eye open for the stranger aspects of modern life, confronting the self, adolescence and mental illness, never monotonous, his is a surrealism completely his own, rooted in the more than real. The central paradox here is: must we be defined by a defining moment? When a fifty-foot monolith appears in the garden, for example. Monomaniac showcases a special talent, writing in full technicolour.

Liam Bates poetry is cynical and louche, his pamphlet Working Animals explores how fauna, typically pests: spiders, wasps, gnats and maggots are all present, intersect unhelpfully with a world we believe to be our own but is not our own. Liam Bates is a fresh and frequently delightful poet of the anthropocene, whose words crawl under your skin and, when you're least expecting, bite.