Please join us to celebrate the launch of Imogen Cassels’ debut collection, Silk Work, with an evening of readings from the author plus special guests Phoebe Stuckes and Sam Weselowski.
In Silk Work, desire and grief are a double-edged subject, elucidated through a kind of lyric diffidence. Forms, translations, folksongs, geographies of longing, and the work of memory are interplayed, though always with the haunting implication that the words we use to document our lives are never quite enough.
As they weave multiple sources from literature, philosophy, visual art and history into ways of reading and documenting, the poems in Silk Work are an exercise in language’s inbuilt, radiant futility, which is both its suffering and its joy.
‘This book is an astonishment – its birds, suns, melancholy, balletic leaps, tender zingers, its “citational beatitude”. Cassels’ poems are skitteringly, ferociously alive. They are bucolic; they are urbane. Each poem feels like its own peculiar dawn, a striking apparition.’ – Maureen McClane
‘I am in awe of the way Cassels combines nouns, sounds and histories with life, where the craft is both eccentric and full of attuned resonances to Lyric cultures. New paradigms are woven, then shot through. Her clarities are heartbreakingly and acutely timed, her discoveries intricate. This is fine, fine, fine work.’ – Holly Pester
Imogen Cassels is the author of various pamphlets, including Chesapeake, VOSS, Arcades, and Mother; beautiful things. Silk Work is her debut collection. She lives in London.
Phoebe Stuckes is a writer from Somerset. Her pamphlet, Gin & Tonic, was published by The Poetry Business and shortlisted for The Michael Marks Award. She has been awarded an Eric Gregory Award and The Geoffrey Dearmer Prize. Her first full-length collection, Platinum Blonde, was published by Bloodaxe Books in 2020 and was highly commended in The Forward Prizes. Her most recent pamphlet The One Girl Gremlin was published by Verve in 2021 and her first novel Dead Animals was published by Sceptre books in April 2024.
Sam Weselowski is a poet and essayist from Vancouver, Canada. His most recent chapbook is I Love My Job Too (If a Leaf Falls, 2024). He lives in the West Midlands.
