Carcanet - James Womack and Claudine Toutoungi, at Heffers Bookshop

Heffers is delighted to welcome two Carcanet authors to the shop on the evening of the 15th of October to discuss their new collections.

Why Are You Shouting?, James Womack's fourth Carcanet collection, thinks about two things in particular: our struggle as individuals to find connections between ourselves, with friends, family and lovers, and the efforts we make as groups to connect to the environment we live and die in. Written in the shadow of the climate crisis and the pandemic years, the poems set out to find points of hope and solidarity, against a common backdrop of disruption and collapse to which we are often wilfully blind.

This tragi-comic, or comi-tragic grief journal blends loss and low vision into poems that issue in startling joy. Claudine Toutoungi's Emotional Support Horse tracks the course of a lived bereavement intensified by sight loss and eco-stress. But wit is not only an element of style, it is a state of imagination, and it leads out of dark depth into the region of joy.

Host or Publisher Heffers Bookshop