Please join us to celebrate the launch of two new Carcanet collections, Why Are You Shouting? by James Womack and Emotional Support Horse by Claudine Toutoungi.

Tickets cost £5 and must be booked in advance via this link. Ticket cost includes refreshments. Copies of the books will be available to buy on the night.

Emotional Support Horse tracks the tragicomedy of grief, and out of low vision, bereavement and eco-stress blends poems of startling wit, verve and solace. A woman longs to transform into Nicola Walker in a cop car, or a Hungarian Vizsla, or just to find an equal footing with her doctor. Personal and planetary fractures blur in these vivid, dreamlike pages that will speak to anyone who has faced down confusion and rupture, when they strike. In part soulful, in part self-help, the poems veer between droll and despairing, their swings from high to low and back again reflecting a self adrift on a choppy sea. A self, however, not alone, but accompanied throughout by a host of other species. From earthworms to wolfhounds, flamingos to Konic ponies, the world of Emotional Support Horse flickers with light and life, charting sorrow’s depths even as it stumbles upon joy.

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.

Alongside these concerns runs a narrative of personal blindness and self-enchantment, a willingness to allow oneself to be misled in order to have a quiet life. If the collection's title suggests that raising one's voice is the readiest way to reach other people, the poems themselves dare to offer quieter solutions, too: there is space for humour and kindness, even a degree of positive thinking about the state the world is in.

The ghost of Cassandra, the Trojan princess given the gift of prophecy but condemned to have no one believe her words, haunts the collection: her life is a warning, but also an antidote to willed ignorance.

'The God of whom I speak is dead.
I did my makeup in a disco ball.
I looked at the whole magnificent
creation of the Lord, and asked,
sadly, "Is it cake?"'

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