Squid Squad

'There's a melancholy undertow to his humour: taken together, these poems come to feel like glimpses into the Eleanor Rigby-ish private lives of all the lonely people, as they sit at home, playing with peanut shells, drawing on the walls, lost in tangled thoughts, doing nothing.' Tristram Fane Saunders, The Telegraph
'Welton's tuning-fork sentences make small things sing with precise beauty' Jeremy Noel-Tod, The Sunday Times
'Welton is a poet who resists the idea of a stable, complete, consumable poem, as his iterative patterns of poems (in a book that calls itself 'a novel') show - and certainly, both books are short on satisfaction, questioning in different ways what poetic satisfaction might be. The mimed actions, like unoriginal incorrect versions of ancient epigrams, seem to take us to the brink of textual meaning, again and again, and then leave us there, like cartoon coyotes, scrabbling in midair.' The Poetry Review
'Through Welton's abundant assonance and alliteration, through the accents and rhythms of his syntax, sensations become linguistically tangible... Welton probes ordinary micro-phenomena to reveal the ineffable... Throughout Squid Squad, the reader is in the company of an acute observer and expert linguist turning his attention to his own use of language. Welton is without peer when it comes to putting slow motion perceptions into words' Nasser Hussain, Times Literary Supplement
'A beautiful, exactly written piece of nonsense-noir' Keith Miller, TLS Books of the Year 2020
'No book this year has brought me more joy.' Tristram Fane Saunders, Telegraph Poetry Books of the Year 2020