Out for Air
Format:Paperback
Publisher:Penned in the Margins
Published:16th May '22
Should be back in stock very soon
The exhilarating first collection by former professional skateboarder Olly Todd
‘Out for Air creates a world of familiarity gone strange, a world of signs of the human in motion, where the living in place becomes its constant study. It makes a hard to pin down language which is all its own, and which mirrors its subjects’ international scope, its playful, sometimes arch, worldview, and which announces a wholly original voice.’
WILL BURNS
Infused with movement, surprise and play, Out for Air presents a unique vision of the built environment, celebrating places where ‘the bridges are endless / beyond the cantilever / of reality’. Expansive in scope but intricate in form, a masterclass in precision engineering. Todd rewires T. S. Eliot’s Waste Land in his strange, compelling descriptions of the modern city: melting asphalt; a U-turning taxi; a diner swallowed by a sinkhole. In this disorientating landscape the skateboarder-poet is genius loci, the spirit of the place.
From Manhattan’s ‘silky streets’ and the Pacific Coast Highway to inner-city London and his native Cumbria, together these poems record a life lived on the move, in motion, on the cusp of things.
‘I'm dazzled by this wonderful debut...The language itself crunches, glides, grinds. A radically different way of experiencing the built and natural environment and an endlessly engaging, witty, serious and astute new voice.’ - Luke Kennard
‘Out for Air is an inventive and alluring debut...With shades of Kleinzahler and Eliot, these poems explore angles and movement, friendship and distance, in a voice that is genuinely original, graceful and often strange.’ - Martha Sprackland
‘Through his words a whole world and potential opens up, a distillation of experience that feels universal and intimate.’ - Nick Jensen
‘Out for Air creates a world of familiarity gone strange, a world of signs of the human in motion, where the living in place becomes its constant study. It makes a hard-to-pin-down language which is all its own, and which mirrors its subjects’ international scope, its playful, sometimes arch, worldview, and which announces a wholly original voice.’ - Will Burns
Olly Todd’s debut collection, Out for Air, is one of acute angles and constant surprise. His is a somewhat degraded diction, at least in the sense of his rarely reaching for an ornately lyrical register; instead there is something brutalist, a language made of concrete and artful lighting. It’s rare to encounter a new poet whose work is absolutely unpredictable, from one line to the next, but Todd is capable of jarring shifts, refreshing coinages. [...] These are poems as atmosphere – rich in poise, and somewhat sui generis, blending modernist urges towards cataloguing the metropolis with something of Todd’s own.
Declan Ryan, The Poetry Review
Olly Todd’s debut collection, Out for Air, is one of acute angles and constant surprise. His is a somewhat degraded diction, at least in the sense of his rarely reaching for an ornately lyrical register; instead there is something brutalist, a language made of concrete and artful lighting. It’s rare to encounter a new poet whose work is absolutely unpredictable, from one line to the next, but Todd is capable of jarring shifts, refreshing coinages. [...] These are poems as atmosphere – rich in poise, and somewhat sui generis, blending modernist urges towards cataloguing the metropolis with something of Todd’s own.
Declan Ryan, The Poetry Review
ISBN: 9781913850074
Dimensions: unknown
Weight: 132g
77 pages