Salt Modern Poets-A Full-On Basso Profundo

The collection addresses shared, topical challenges like identity, gender roles, belonging and family, at a time of shifting, heightened uncertainty. Themes which affect all of us like toxic masculinity, family disfunction, war, and climate, in fiercely imaginative, jagged, yet compassionate, sometimes absurdist, surreal fashion. Ken Evans’s collection is structured in three inter-locking and overlapping sequences: Family; Masculinity; and America. Subjects range from the personal sacrifice and meaning of an organ donation; the loss of a child in still-birth; the death of a friend through drink, as well as bigger themes of our constant wars and forebodings of climate collapse. But these poems also experience hope, humour and optimism shining through – and often co-existing with the darker themes, thus poems on the small vagaries and mishaps of our digital lives, of the money-anxieties of car maintenance, or of negotiating airport security with a replacement hip.