Play With Me

Description

From NHS overdose clinics to overrun gardens, talking Cambodian treehouses to the teenage perversion of a young Scot on a French Exchange, Pedersen's poetry is a rich and fantastical feast of flavours, landscape and language. On the menu is everything from ice oysters and chateaubriand to pickled onions and Buckfast-soaked bread sticks. Like the man himself, these poems will tingle toes and raise eyebrows in equal measures.

Michael Pedersen (b. 1984) is a poet, playwright and animateur with an electric reputation on the performance circuit and a prolific precedent of collaborations, having teamed up with some of the UK's top musicians, film-makers and artists. He is widely published in magazines, journals, anthologies and e-zines; his inaugural chapbook 'Part-Truths' (Koo Press) was a Callum MacDonald Memorial Award finalist; its sequel 'The Basic Algebra of Buttering Bread' (Windfall Books) received flocks of reviewer plaudits. He is co-founder and circus master at Neu! Reekie! - now one of the country's most formidable literary nights and DIY record labels - and a key creative within Dream Tower Productions. He's also the lyricist for cult band Jesus, Baby! and has written short plays for various troupes including the National Theatre of Scotland. Having travelled the world and taught in Cambodia for a year, Pedersen writes verse that gives a vivid idea of what it is to be young, socially aware and irrepressibly optimistic in the melting pot of the twenty-first century. He also enjoys sewing.

'Michael's poems are so physical you can almost touch the images in them. Fabulously sensual and alive. I adore poetry like this' -- Stephen Fry 'If you like poetry that is cool, smart, hilarious and quirky and can just suddenly rip your heart out, Michael Pedersen is your man' - -- Irvine Welsh 'Michael throws open the gates to the kingdom and all the words are singing. He knows deeply that life is nothing without play. And everything is play to him - pain and love and fun and thought and memory. Michael makes them all majestic and beautifully honest. How exciting to come across a writer with such vigour' -- Ewen Bremner '[R]eminded us how vibrant a thing poetry can (and probably should) be' * The Skinny *