Book cover for Comic Timing by Holly Pester

Comic Timing

2025 Released
96 Pages
1-2 Hours
Ebook Unavailable
Audiobook Unavailable
Paperback Unavailable
Hardback Unavailable
Granta BooksISBN 9781783786862

The long-awaited first collection of poems from an influential young poet.

Comic Timing, Holly Pester's extraordinary debut collection of poems, chronicles the experience of living and working as a radical and resistant act. These poems shunt a reader between the political and personal via unique, fragmentary and illusory turns of phrase.

Holly tackles marginal bodies, landlords, bog butter, desire, domestic and civic spaces in an unique and illusory voice. She chronicles the prevailing mood of our times, mining radical and anarchic histories to offer a collection of political resistance with both absurdity and seriousness.

These poems interrogate and poke fun at the expectations of people in a commodified culture with a wry humor. Combining a beautifully performed naivety with a profound intellect, this collection is a hugely original approach to a number of pressing issues. Worker's rights, feminisms, reproductive rights and marginalized bodies and their positions are all thought through in this startling and innovative voice.

Holly Pester

Holly Pester is a writer and Senior Lecturer in the Department of Literature, Film and Theatre, University of Essex. Her books and works include Ecloques for Idle Workers (BBC Radio and Distance No Object, 2018), Comic Timing (Granta, 2021), which was shortlisted for the Forward Prize, and The Lodgers (Granta, 2024). She is based in Essex, England.

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