Gloucester Road Books present Nisha Ramayya and Fantasia, one of this year’s most eagerly anticipated poetry collections. In Fantasia, Nisha engages with jazz, the music of Alice Coltrane, and the relationship between listening and politics. Nisha will be in conversation with Bristol poet, Tom Sastry.

'Fantasia hazards a listening walk through seashells, telecommunication networks, and cosmic vibrations, to learn something new about how we sound. Alice Coltrane’s experiments in jazz and spiritual community guide these poems that hum and glitch, that leap across space-time, landing in and reflecting the discordant music of life on earth.'

Dr Nisha Ramayya is a poet, performer, and lecturer in creative writing. She is the author of the pamphlets Notes on Sanskrit, Correspondences, In Me the Juncture, and Threads, co-authored with Sandeep Parmar and Bhanu Kapil. Her first book, States of the Body Produced by Love was published in 2019. Nisha is a member of the ‘Race & Poetry & Poetics in the UK’ research group and the interdisciplinary practice-as-research group Generative Constraints.

Tom Sastry is political, ironic, emotional, morbid and funny in all the wrong places. His pamphlet Complicity (2016) was a Poetry School Book of the Year and a Poetry Book Society pamphlet choice. His first collection A Man’s House Catches Fire (2019) was highly commended in the Forward Prize and shortlisted for the Seamus Heaney First Collection Prize. And You have no normal country to return to (2022) is also quite good (citation needed).

Entry requirements: 16+, any under 18s accompanied by 21+ adult 1:1 ratio — Read more — Read less