Poetry Reading Group

Our poetry reading group is returning for 2025! With Zain as our guide, we will be immersing ourselves in a range of exciting voices in the world of poetry. If you’re a fellow poet, a poetry fan, or just looking for your next read, please come along for a fun evening of chatting all things verse!

We will be kicking off the year with three books from 2024. We’ll begin with the winner of the 2024 T. S. Eliot Prize, Peter Gizzi’s stunning collection Fierce Elegy. Next, we’ll be reading Ella Frear’s long-form email to an estate agent, Goodlord. Finally, we will be reading Karen McCarthy Woolf’s self-described “deeply unreliable biography/polyvocal verse novel” about a billionaire’s doll collection, Top Doll.

Here are the dates for the upcoming reading groups:

Wednesday 12th Feb - Fierce Elegy by Peter Gizzi

Tuesday 11th March - Goodlord by Ella Frears

Tuesday 8th April - Top Doll by Karen McCarthy Woolf

There’s no need to prepare but if you feel like it, please feel free to mention a poem, line or stanza you particularly liked (or disliked!) from the collection over the course of the evening.

About Goodlord...

SHORTLISTED FOR THE FORWARD PRIZE 2024
SKY ARTS AWARD NOMINEE for BREAKTHROUGH ARTIST OF THE YEAR 2024
A Guardian BOOK OF THE YEAR 2024

'ALL THE HOT WOMEN I KNOW HAVE ELLA FREARS ON THEIR BEDSIDE TABLES' Sheena Patel

'It's Dostoyevsky's Notes from Underground reimaged for the renting generation' Emily Dinsdale, DAZED

'A dazzling treat of a book, genuinely inventive, spiky and funny' Holly Williams, Observer

'As compelling as any thriller' Graeme Richardson, Sunday Times

'I urge you to read Ella Frears' wild and dark new book' Eva Wiseman, The Observer

'A dark, addictive and deceptively erudite read' Kate Simpson, Telegraph (5*)

I had to wait, input a five-digit code sent to me via text.
When it came through it was:

00000 which seems insane.

I stared at it for more than my allotted minutes.
How is it that I found myself with all those holes?

A row of ohs. Disgusting.
No, I can't go on.

I won't, Ava. Do you watch porn?

Asked by letting agent, Ava, to make an account with the ominous sounding property technology 'Goodlord', our narrator launches into a breathless and rage fuelled reply that swings wildly between anecdotes of chaotic house-shares, grubby university halls, the claustrophobic school days that haunt her still, her various underpaid exploitative jobs at pubs and restaurants, relationships and sexual encounters both troubling and ecstatic, and an artists' residency that offers her the space she craves but demands a complicated transaction in return.

Written in sharp, unflinching prose, Goodlord exposes the grinding inequalities of modern life. It is a blistering exploration of what it means to live in a world where everything, including your dignity, comes with a price tag.