Another Beautiful Day Indoors

Out on the pleasure pier on that benign afternoon, the air heavy with the blossom of vinegar and old tyres, you asked what was the closest I had come to death. more likely to end with a dark flood than a beautiful sundown. As these poems grapple with climate catastrophe, precarious labour, and love, they draw on the full, rich weirdness of the human-made world, with its self-driving cars, official geese and open-plan offices modelled on heaven. A sequence of magical realist short fictions explore 'essential work'; elsewhere Erik Kennedy wonders what it is like to work in the satellite insurance sector. Somehow he gets away with rhyming 'guesses' with 'yeses'. And somehow, even as this book comes up against the most ominous aspects of our future, it uplifts. 'Erik Kennedy's second collection is a delight. What a rare and special thing it is to laugh out loud at poetry. These poems are inventive, wry and beautiful. There's a lot to worry about these days, and Kennedy might just be the an...