Peter Barlow’s Cigarette at the Carlton Club

Our favourite “afternoon of alternative poetries” Peter Barlow’s Cigarette marks its 50th event with a bumper four-strong line-up on 22 November.

Peter Barlow’s Cigarette #50 is a special event featuring four guest readers: Frances Presley, Jeremy Over, David Gaffney and Sarah-Clare Conlon.

We’re very excited to hear from Frances Presley, whose latest book, Black Fens Viral, was published by Shearsman in May. She says: “Black Fens Viral began in summer 2020 when I was recovering from Covid, lockdown was lifting, and I travelled to Norfolk on the slow train through the Black Fens of East Anglia. The notes I made were my first attempt at writing after the illness. This flat agricultural landscape of black peat was marshland before the drainage of the fens. ‘Viral’ refers both to Covid and to a text generator known as the Markov chain: a strange rearrangement of text according to an algorithm based on repeated vowels and consonants. When I input my text, the outcome resembles the viral assault on my mind and body, but also lends itself to discovering new semantic and syntactic patterns.” Frances Presley was born in Derbyshire, grew up in Lincolnshire and Somerset, and lives in London. Shearsman published her Collected Poems 1973-2020 in 2022 as well as other collections including 2014’s Halse for Hazel. She collaborated with the late visual poet Tilla Brading, as well as, on Neither the one nor the other (1999), with PBC #49 reader Elizabeth James (author of 1 : 50 000 : sixteen short poems and Renga +, which includes two rengas written in collaboration with Peter Manson).

We’re also looking forward to seeing Jeremy Over again, following his appearance earlier in the year at the inaugural Manchester Experimental Poetry & Arts Festival. Jeremy Over was born in Leeds in 1961. He now lives on a hill near Llanidloes in the middle of Wales. He is published by Manchester-based Carcanet Press and his poetry was first published in the New Poetries II anthology in 1999. He has had four subsequent collections with Carcanet: A Little Bit of Bread and No Cheese (2001), Deceiving Wild Creatures (2009), Fur Coats in Tahiti (2019) and this year’s Fourth and Walnut.

In anticipation of his upcoming collection of prose poetry, Lakes of Titan (Above/Ground Press), David Gaffney will be reading some brand-new work. Lakes of Titan follows his short story collection Whale, published by Osmosis in 2024, and Concrete Fields (Salt Publishing, 2023), which was longlisted for the Edgehill Short Story Prize. These follow the Salt-published flash fiction and short story collections Sawn-Off Tales (2006), Aromabingo (2007), The Half-Life of Songs (2010) and More Sawn-Off Tales (2013). David Gaffney is also the author of the novels Never Never (2008), All The Places I’ve Ever Lived (2017) and Out Of The Dark (2021), and the graphic novels The Three Rooms In Valerie’s Head (2018) and Rivers (2021) produced with artist Dan Berry and published by Top  Shelf – they are currently working on a third.

Sarah-Clare Conlon has been writer-in-residence at Ilkley Literature Festival, Saul Hay Gallery and Victoria Baths in Manchester. She was longlisted for the National Poetry Competition 2024 and most recently published by aswirl, Blackbox Manifold, Long Poem Magazine and The Manchester Review. Her latest book, Wanderland (Red Ceilings Press), was nominated for the Wainwright Prize and is a Poetry Book Society Summer 2025 Listing. It follows poetry pamphlets Lune (Red Ceilings Press), Using Language (Invisible Hand Press) and cache-cache (Contraband), and prose collection Marine Drive (Broken Sleep Books).

BTW, you can see PBC #49 reader John Goodby at Manchester Poets, now back in its original home of Chorlton Library, on Friday 17 October. Raised in Birmingham, with work taking him to Yorkshire via Cork and Swansea, John Goodby was one of the primary anti-Thatcherite poets and has gone the whole route from Trotskyist-minded alternative history cast in mainstream modes to avant garde process work. He is a Dylan Thomas scholar (see Under the Spelling Wall, 2013) and co-editor, with Lyndon Davies, of The Edge of Necessary (2018), the first anthology of Welsh innovative poetry, and the Hay Poetry Jamborees 2009-12. Works include A Birmingham Yank (1998), uncaged sea (2008), Wine Night White (2010), Illennium (2010) and The No Breath (2018).

Over in Chorlton, you should also check out long-running (in fact, ten years!) Speak Easy at Dulcimer where they host a humdinger of an open mic on the first Thursday of the month.