Broken Spine Readings
Every 2 months
Second gig!
Headline Poets – Featuring big names who push the form forward.
This
month: TIM ALLEN (who was brilliant!)
Tim Allen lived for many years in Plymouth working as a primary school teacher. For two decades he helped, through the magazine Terrible Work and the Language Club reading series, to establish a vibrant poetry community. A Democracy of Poisons, one of a number of recent volumes, is a sequence of prose poems, is Tim Allen’s third Shearsman book and his first completed work following a move to Lancashire where he has been heavily involved with the avant wing of the North-West poetry scene, co-hosting the . The texts run parallel with the years of Austerity leading to Brexit and its fall-out, issues internalised here before resurfacing within new narrative contexts and scenarios in which modern cultural history competes with autobiographical conflict to be transported elsewhere by the chimera of language. Motifs arising from the perspective of age and change echo, but sparsely; what really unites the poems is a cruel humour, as often self-directed as aimed at the democracy of poisons. Weird writing, funny too.
Next readings in this series, include Sarah Crewe and Maria Isakova-Bennett at least.
Check for future details! We are currently looking for a new venue. But, in the meantime:
Also for your Merseyside poetry diary: European Poetry Festival, Open Eye Gallery, Liverpool: Sunday 6th July 2025: 3-5 Free, drop in (North West poets and European poets in collaboration. Usually fascinating.) I'll be collaborating...
Details : Liverpool 2025 - July 6th — European Poetry Festival
