Peter Barlow’s Cigarette at Waterstones
Sarah-Clare Conlon, Literature Editor
One of Manchester’s regular avant-garde poetry reading series, Peter Barlow’s Cigarette has been providing a platform for innovative and exciting poetry from the UK and beyond for a number of years. Organised by Tim Allen, Joey Frances and Rachel Sills, themselves poets, the bi-monthly event is free, has free wine and gives you the perfect excuse to free yourself up from the burdens of Saturday afternoon otherwise, we presume, spent traipsing around the shops in a panic-flap that it’s now officially a month to Christmas.
This latest manifestation of Peter Barlow’s Cigarette sees four performers plying their poetic wares: Edge Hill Press’s Jessica Tillings, Alec Newman, who runs indie publishing house Knives Forks and Spoons, and Andrew Spragg, widely published, including with Bloodaxe, Red Ceiling and ZimZalla (with links to The Other Room).
Headlining the December event is Trinidadian poet Vahni Capildeo, who won the Forward Prize for best poetry collection in 2016 with Measures of Expatriation, which came out on Manchester-based publisher Carcanet early last year. Her next, much-anticipated, collection, Venus as a Bear, is due out in April, again with Carcanet, so this will be an opportunity to hear some of Vahni’s brand-new work before anyone else!
This event is 4-6pm; free entry.
