Cal O'Reilly queer poetry book launch

We can't wait to come back to Belfast and celebrate 'Boyish', Cal O'Reilly's debut pamphlet.

Cal O’Reilly is a poet from Wexford, currently studying in Belfast. His poems have been published by Dedalus Press, Banshee, Magma, Fruitslice, catflap, fourteen poems and others. He was selected for the Poetry Ireland Introductions Series in 2025.

'Boyish' will be released October 5th and we'll have books with us to sell on the night!

Cal will be joined by acclaimed writers William Keohane, Mícheál McCann, and Zara Meadows.

See what advance readers have said about Boyish below:

Boyish, in its humble qualifier, is a pamphlet that pays attention to the gentle, inevitable ways we become something. These poems are assured, dextrous and delightfully various, and, most of all, they are perforated with an infectious tenacity that will remind you of “some / reserve you didn’t know you had”. Cal O’Reilly is the real deal.

Mícheál McCann

Cal O’Reilly has a distinct and astonishing poetic voice. In Boyish, his poems speak of longing, of family, of friendship. Everything O’Reilly writes is imbued with a deep understanding of the landscape, the body, and his literary history. You’re going to love this pamphlet. Truly. 

William Keohane

Boyish is acutely perceptive, proudly of its time and place, often hilarious, and deeply moving. These poems locate transmasculinity in inherited poetic genres –– the bucolic, the ekphrastic, the lyric –– and will transform any reader who encounters and experiences them. A necessary Irish poetic coming-of-age, one of the most impressive and exciting of its kind since Heaney’s Death of a Naturalist. 

Zara Meadows