Published 2026. Paperback, 8.5 x 5.5 ins, 90pp, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781837380534 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]

“As an American—even as an American who is passionate about poetry from the U.K.—I cannot see what I might see if I lived in the U.K., but from my vantage, it seems to me any discussion of the most important figures in poetry in the U.K. at present would have to include Aaron Kent. And perhaps when one thinks of Kent, one thinks first of him as a publisher. But it is as a poet that he most directly electrifies me. I chase his work down as soon as it appears, eager to make fresh contact with English at one of the spots where it is most alive. His Selected Poems 2013-2026 demonstrates why.” —Shane McCrae

“The boundless and ferocious energy of Aaron Kent’s poems is tempered by a mordant knife edge wit and keen observation of our dystopic human moment. Through this runs a thread of lyric beauty, revelatory in its profound joy and grace. A deep awareness of mortality haunts each page, as does the long process of recovery from illness.

These Selected Poem s reveal a poet of wide reach, intent and purpose, with poems that amaze, challenge, and rip away assumptions. We meet foxes purring about redemption, we sail the long river of the unconscious. We share the pain of the poet’s insomnia, which he renders with vehement clarity, we go into pubs armed with boxing gloves and a can of socialism. These poems ready us for everything.

The poet says there are more cops in this world than dreams. Our over regulated unequal society is a main source of concern here. The poet shows the hard scrabble of life where the economic dice is cast against the majority of us; he speaks with earned anger and comprehension of the realities of social deprivation, locating some of his poems in Redruth, West Cornwall, where he grew up. This is an area that despite being flagged up as part of Cornwall’s tourist paradise is, in reality, a community still battling post-industrial decline.

The complex webwork of familial relationship generational memory, and dialogue with the past gives these poems additional impact. Throughout, an imagination is at full stretch, and craft and confidence is at work in every line.” —Penelope Shuttle

“Aaron Kent has created a densely woven and yet philosophically ‘open’ poetics of confrontation. Steeped in a vital, sometimes grim but always rejuvenating irony, he offers a manifesto of survival wrought out of loss.

Constantly challenging the discreet charms and the exclusions created by class oppression, he has given us poems that embody love, parenthood, marriage, body and environment, to guide us towards complex ways of understanding physical and conceptual health.

Uniquely but socially voiced, this is a committed poetics of necessity in which language bends around opposition to work the alternatives and find a way through inclemency. The nests may be vulnerable, but knowing how they might persist in a toxic environment increases the prospects for life and maybe even some forms of liberty. These are linguistically disruptive and innovative ‘personal’ poems with an underlying public conscience.

There’s a weird addiction to life while things constantly threaten to unravel. Resisting the privileged operators’ schemes to make things even more their way, ‘the scum’ finds a way to float out of range, creating a poetry of refusal, a poetics of opposition to class control.

This is poetry at a slant to privilege. Precarious as ‘the image’ itself, life under pressure persists against the investments of class distinction, working to foil the hazards created by the wealthy. This is also a poetry about reclaiming the damaged body.” —John Kinsella

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