The Yellow-Lighted Bookshop

Shortlisted for the Forward Prize Best First Collection 2023, the poems in ‘Cowboy’ are knowing, millennial, internet-sick, funny, with deep undercurrents: of embodied and disembodied spiritualities; of the knowledge of animals; of familial mythologies; of grief and longing; of autism and navigating diagnoses; of early and enduring disappointment; of the wildness underneath the smooth glass-and-chrome surfaces of contemporary life. The echo of a question permeates the collection – where does a person grow up?