In Your Mouth
£10.00
In this compelling collection, Paul Brookes takes you to the ordinary spaces where lives intersect—shop floors, queues, fleeting conversations—and reveals the deep currents of humanity running beneath them. The poems, rooted in the disquiet of pandemic-era experience, are marked by a patient wisdom and tenderness: an understanding that truth often resides not in grand gestures, but in the smallest exchanges—a damaged loaf, a nervous question, a moment of distance or closeness.
ISBN: 978-1-918132-02-1, 82 pps., £10 inc. p. and p.
During the pandemic certain workers were renamed ‘key workers’ or described as ‘essential’. Applause rang out for healthcare staff. For a moment the people who stocked shelves at midnight or cleaned public spaces were acknowledged as necessary to the functioning of society. But the change was brief. As restrictions lifted, so did the language. The term ‘key worker’ faded. The old hierarchies returned.
This is why ‘In Your Mouth’ matters. It resists that forgetting. The poems remember the days of early uncertainty. The taped arrows on the floor, the plastic screens at the till, the way customers watched one another over the tops of masks. They document work often described as ‘replaceable’, yet which is indispensable. These poems insist that such labour, and the people who perform it, remain visible.
ISBN: 978-1-918132-02-1, 82 pps., £10 inc. p. and p.
