Join us to celebrate the launch of Imogen Cassels' Silk Work, from the always-immaculate Prototype publishing. It's a brilliant, linguistically inventive, lyrical collection, described by Maureen Mclane as "an astonishment – its birds, suns, melancholy, balletic leaps, tender zingers, its “citational beatitude”. Cassels’ poems are skitteringly, ferociously alive. They are bucolic; they are urbane. Each poem feels like its own peculiar dawn, a striking apparition." Imogen will be joined by local poet and author Ralf Webb, who will give us a taster of his forthcoming collection with Penguin, Highway Cottage, followed by a Q&A.

In *Silk Work*, desire and grief are a double-edged subject, elucidated through a kind of lyric diffidence. Forms, translations, folksongs, geographies of longing, and the work of memory are interplayed, though always with the haunting implication that the words we use to document our lives are never quite enough. As they weave multiple sources from literature, philosophy, visual art and history into ways of reading and documenting, the poems in *Silk Work* are an exercise in language’s inbuilt, radiant futility, which is both its suffering and its joy.

Ralf Webb's forthcoming Highway Cottage weaves the story of a strange homecoming. A young poet travels to the heart of the English countryside – back to the West Country village where he grew up. Descending into the valley where the small riverside community still resides, he finds himself within a dreamlike landscape, peopled by uncanny figures: drone operators and hunters; half-familiar friends; local historians, and braying councillors trying desperately to oust a community of Travellers. Hovering between reality and folklore, the locale is at once idyllic and in decay; the visitor is both unsettled and soothed by it. Slowly, we start to sense that both villagers and poet might be under threat – not just from the future, but from the past.

Bios:

Imogen Cassels is the author of *Chesapeake*, *Mother*, *beautiful things*, *VOSS* and *Arcades*. She was a Foyle Young Poet of the Year in 2013, and in 2015 was selected as a Young Poet on the Underground. Her poems have appeared in the Cambridge Literary Review, The White Review, the London Review of Books, Blackbox Manifold, Datableed, Ambit and The London Magazine, amongst other places. She reviews for the Times Literary Supplement, and lives in London.

Ralf Webb is the author of the poetry collection *Rotten Days in Late Summer* (Penguin, 2021), which was shortlisted for the Forward Prize, and *Strange Relations* (Sceptre, 2024), a book on masculinity, sexuality and art in mid-century America. His poems, essays, and short fiction have appeared in Fantastic Man, Granta, the Guardian and the London Review of Books. He tutors in creative writing at Goldsmiths, University of London.

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