Ahren Warner's Second Collection

Ahren Warner's second collection of poems opens with the sequence Lutèce, te amo: a raw paean to the Paris it inhabits that flits between past and present and offers both adoration and horror in equal measure.

Elsewhere, London licks and laps; an anonymous man works his bones with a micro-plane and translations of Baudelaire and Kojève rub shoulders with Kurt Cobain and Little Lord Tory-Tit.

More capricious, fleshly and darker than Warner's previous work, Pretty culminates in Nervometer: thirteen poems hovering between a collage, translation and performance of Antonin Artaud's Le Pèse-nerfs, which bring Pretty to a beautifully ugly end.

Poetry Book Society Recommendation.