Antony Owen

Collecting 15 years of poetry, Post-Atomic Glossaries is Antony Owen's magnum opus, a selection including his Ted Hughes award shortlisted collection, The Nagasaki Elder, alongside selections from every book he has published, and an impressive range of new poems. The poems that make up this collection explore war, nuclear power, terrorism, the death penalty, genocide, Hiroshima, nuclear weaponry, family life, masculinity, and much more. The poems are, by turns, beautiful, disturbing, uplifting, and heart-breaking. This is a remarkable body of work by an outstanding poet.

A deeply authentic collection of poems, offering moments of rare beauty. It's always brave to speak openly about depression. It's even more courageous to shape and craft a public work from this most sacred experience. With stunning tenderness and exquisite language, Owen exposes a world of hidden truths. Ones many of us can relate to and understand. An absolute must read for all concerned with the human condition, and the power of words to transform.- Helen Calcutt This new collection by Antony Owen is commendable for its risk-taking themes and does not shy away from taboo subjects. Owen takes the reader with him right to the edge, and then over it, through the personal to the universal and then even further, to the point of collective defenestration. As he says himself 'life is too precious to be timid'. This timely collection shines a spotlight on suicide, autistic related depression, and those soul-destroying alpha attitudes like 'man up', that prevail in the workplace and beyond. These poems demand attention, seek recognition, plead for intervention, and beg for release. It is an unsettling, yet immersive work, that growls through its teeth. This straight-talking, no holds barred, narrative resonates well beyond the page, exposing a fiercely, tenacious tenderness beneath.- Chaucer Cameron Owen's work is vitally important now more than ever. A true and remarkable writer who wears his heart like the Coventry City crest.- Jamie Thrasivoulou

Here, we are reminded that poetry is more than the ivory towers of academia. Writing a parable of the working-class, Antony Owen has written a text perfectly placed in the anti-colonial fight in education ... dismantling race and class in the ruins of empire. Truly a master stroke of poetry that every person on GCSE, A-Level and university English courses needs to study.- Tre VentourAntony Owen takes us back to his adolescence in Coventry; to Park Lane nightclub 'where posh girls licked salt from our piss stained hands.' These poems are odes to youth and pop music, lyrical and lippy, full of fag-butts in urinals and gum-grey bras. They filled my heart and left me 'drowning in the landfill of first light.' - Luke WrightA thoroughly enjoyable read from an expert wordsmith whose adventurous and colourful poems are full of eloquent insights and surreal surprises. - Dave LordanOwen's work is extraordinary in its readiness to draw our attention to what is all too often passed off as ugly, too brutal, too honest for humanity to bear. Yet this poetry reminds us that humanity is bloody, it is gritty and that, of course is its beauty.- Katy Wareham-Morris