We are delighted that East Bristol Books are hosting the Bristol launch of Imogen Cassels’ debut poetry collection Silk Work, with readings from the author alongside poet Ralf Webb.

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.

Imogen Cassels is the author of Chesapeake, Mother, beautiful things, VOSS and Arcades*. She was a Foyle Young Poet of the Year in 2013, and in 2015 was selected as a Young Poet on the Underground. Her poems have appeared in the Cambridge Literary Review, The White Review, the London Review of Books, Blackbox Manifold, Datableed, Ambit and The London Magazine, amongst other places. She reviews for the Times Literary Supplement, and lives in London.

Ralf Webb is the author of the poetry collection Rotten Days in Late Summer (Penguin, 2021), which was shortlisted for the Forward Prize, and Strange Relations (Sceptre, 2024), a book on masculinity, sexuality and art in mid-century America. His poems, essays, and short fiction have appeared in Fantastic Man, Granta, the Guardian and the London Review of Books. He tutors in creative writing at Goldsmiths, University of London.