Ƨ - Tom Blake

There is something sexily pleasurable in the pain behind Tom Blake’s Ƨ. It reports back from many different battlegrounds - bacterial, psychological, military - and talks dirty about the slow decay of our bodies as our fingers tighten around the neck of our planet. Blake’s vision is ruminative with huge gulps of melancholy. His verses have an oracular energy, unspooling in hypnotic, sing-song cadences while warning us against our baser natures. His lines reveal something about the mercurial priority of poetry itself, as the poet skulks between “loud cafes” and “sad beaches”. Ƨ crouches and snarls in the corners of the mind before bursting out of the mouth and turning to ash in mid air. The apocalypse has never sounded so sexy.”
Alex Neilson

“Blake is expert at capturing the minutiae of the everyday; impressive considering the enormity of the themes that circle and swoop like vultures, like parakeets. His verses sweep through cities, capturing mundane details as he goes while skirting the shadows of his own mortality.”
Tom Spooner