Book Launch: Talk a Blue Streak - Lila Matsumoto

Free entry

Join us for the Nottingham launch of Lila Matsumoto’s third poetry collection, Talk a Blue Streak, published by Monitor. The event will include a series of readings by fellow writers Jazmine Linklater and Alan Fielden and will be a chance to meet the author and pick up a signed copy of the book.

We'll also have a selection of natural wine and beer to celebrate the occasion.

About Talk a Blue Streak

In 1990, a girl moves to the USA. She goes to school, learns English, becomes an
American citizen, and aspires to become a writer. But what is she to make of the extravagance, bombast, and damage she encounters in the new country’s language and customs? And what about the shrink-wrapped hunks of frozen meat, hurricanes, and the cat-eye marbles scattered on the road? Hugely pleasurable, in turns funny and dolorous, Talk a Blue Streak examines how the act of writing declares a selfhood, but one that is always performative, looped, and curlicued.⁣

Event Format

- Beam will be open as usual from 9am on Saturday.

- Book launch from: 4pm

– Drinks continue until 6pm

Lila Matsumoto’s publications include Two Twin Pipes Sprout Water (Prototype, 2021), which was commended for the Forward Poetry Prize and recommended by the Poetry Book Society, Urn & Drum (Shearsman, 2018), and The Very Nature of Materiality is an Entanglement (In Other Words, 2024). She plays in the band Food People and teaches creative writing and poetics at the University of Nottingham.

Jazmine Linklater is a poet and writer based in Manchester, where she is a regional editor for the online art writing platform Corridor8. She has published four poetry chapbooks, most recently Snagged on red thread (Monitor, 2025). She is undertaking practice-based research in art writing and ekphrastic encounters at Sheffield University.

Alan Fielden is a British-Korean writer, performance maker, and poet. Winner of the Oxford Samuel Beckett Theatre Trust Award for Marathon, with JAMS, co-produced by the Barbican. Recent productions include Container at New Diorama Theatre, April 2025. His writing has been published by Prototype, If A Leaf Falls, Minor Literatures, Broken Sleep Press, and a collection of his plays is forthcoming with Monitor.

About Monitor Books

Monitor Books is a publication platform for poetry, etc., founded in 2019. We publish necessary, idiosyncratic writing in bespoke editions.
The press is edited by Rory Cook and Rachael Allen. Designers and friends include Alan Fielden, Rich James, Joseph Haigh, Joe Hales, John Newton. Website photographs are by Liam Chilton.

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