Please join us to celebrate the launch of Near-Life Experience by Rowland Bagnall. The reading will be hosted by Luke Kennard. The event will feature readings and discussion, and audience members will have the opportunity to ask their own questions. We will show the text during readings so that you can read along.

Registration for this online event will cost £2, redeemable against the cost of the book. You will receive the discount code and instructions for how to purchase the book in your confirmation email as well as during and after the event.

The poems in Near-Life Experience are curious about the present moment, its weather and animals, its objects and things. They want to make it real in language, catching it before it vanishes. Documenting landscapes, paintings, insects and trees, Near-Life Experience offers a world where understanding is subverted by the day’s distractions and the unexpected shapes of the imagination.

How do I relate to this? What does it mean? What’s happening, exactly? Does experience experience me? With descriptive precision and inventiveness, the poet finds humour and panic at the edges of the actual. The poems measure expanding and contracting times, birthdays, seasons, climate breakdown, witnessing the moment and its ‘sheer / ongoing changes’.

About the speakers:

Rowland Bagnall’s poetry first appeared in New Poetries VII (2018). A Few Interiors, his first collection, was published by Carcanet in 2019. His poetry, reviews and essays have appeared in Poetry London, PN Review, The Art Newspaper and The Los Angeles Review of Books. He lives and works in Oxford.

Luke Kennard (1981) is a poet and novelist who lives in Birmingham, England. He won an Eric Gregory award for his poetry in 2005 and his 2nd book of poems The Harbour Beyond the Movie (2007) was shortlisted for the Forward Prize, making him the youngest poet to be nominated in the prize’s history. His 5th collection, Cain (2016), was shortlisted for the International Dylan Thomas Prize 2017. His first novel, The Transition (4th Estate), longlisted for the Desmond Elliott award, was published in 2017 and his second, The Answer to Everything (Harper Collins) was published in 2021. Notes on the Sonnets, a sequence of 154 prose poems in response to Shakespeare’s sonnets was published by Penned in the Margins in 2021 and won the Forward Prize for Best Collection that year. He is a Professor of Creative Writing and Literary Studies at the University of Birmingham. His work is influenced by absurdism, theology, recursive thoughts, and fake-confessional poetry. He lecturers at the University of Birmingham. He is currently working on a novel called Black Bag, about a disastrous social psychology experiment from the late 60s; and a collection of poetry about the prophet Jonah, researching prophecy, pressured speech and the strange relationship between poem and audience.