Poetry Evening with Lorcán Black

Lorcán Black is an Irish writer whose poetry has been published in The Tomahawk Review, Stirring, The Rush, Grim&Gilded, New Writing Scotland, The Los Angeles Review, Assaracus & The Stinging Fly, among numerous others. He has previously worked as a broadcast journalist as a radio newsreader, a print journalist and now works in higher education.

His brilliant new collection Strange Husbandry contrasts modern-day stories of queer passion with older stories from myth and history. The title references not just husbandry in farming of crops and animals, but a more personal rendering of the word, calling on its etymology, meaning to manage carefully. Strange Husbandry is rooted in the city of London during the years of the COVID-19 pandemic and the beginning of war in Ukraine, a strange moment in the metropolis characterised by lockdown, missing persons and terror attacks.

Without minimising the cruelness and hurt of worlds, modern and historical, Strange Husbandry suggests the possibility nevertheless of a queer quality of care which acknowledges the pain and precariousness that exist in both personal stories and external conflicts.

‘Through pandemic isolation and upheaval; through the glitter and gutters of London; through spectral exes and specular new love; through the guts of night, the self, Tori Amos, and the moon, Strange Husbandry sings.’ – Chen Chen

‘Black is a poet whose name we will remember for a long time.’ – Kailey Tedesco

‘Strange Husbandry is a collection alert to beauty and to terror.’ – Richie Hofmann

‘These urgent poems are warnings, confessions, declarations, and blessings. I feel them, sensorial and lyric, within my own body.’ – Blas Falconer