Unicorn Flavoured.

   — J H Prynne

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Every poem is a dizzy word-dazzle, a dance of images, expressing a real life of work, babies, love and loss. Some are shaped by word-music.

   — Gillian Clarke

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To wake from the simulation that seems to equate its power with surcease. Aaron Kent's The Working Classic can be nothing other than existential kinetic as neo-renewal as liberation from the class stamped rigidities of generational inbred British boundedness. 

   — Will Alexander

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Rather than a Spectrist literary hoax or metafictional game, Kent provides us with a quite moving reflection on pseudonymity, masking and revelation. Presented here as a long-lost Collected, Vilagos becomes an avatar, an alter-ego, a pocket universe with a range of concrete, sonic and disruptive strategies at his disposal, and a lengthy career in which to explore them. The invention and sheer thoroughness is bracing in itself. The paradox is that which is conceptually liberating only brings us closer to an encounter with the self; that however ornate the hall of mirrors, we're still the one racing through it.

   — Luke Kennard

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Poetry that vibrates on its own frequency, and invites the reader into its own surreal soundscapes. Here, new connections of language make us see the world afresh, and ask the reader to tune in to the long-held notes of truth just beneath the surface.

   — Andrew McMillan

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As an American—even as an American who is passionate about poetry from the U.K.—I cannot see what I might see if I lived in the U.K., but from my vantage, it seems to me any discussion of the most important figures in poetry in the U.K. at present would have to include Aaron Kent. And perhaps when one thinks of Kent, one thinks first of him as a publisher. But it is as a poet that he most directly electrifies me. I chase his work down as soon as it appears, eager to make fresh contact with English at one of the spots where it is most alive. His Selected Poems 2013-2026 demonstrates why.

   — Shane McCrae

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There are books that UK poetry needs, and there are books that UK poetry deserves. Needs, like the salvation of its soul. Deserves, like a smack in the face with a Millwall brick. The Working Classic is both. It is, amongst other things, an incisive and playful engagement with what poetry is, to whom it belongs, and with the endless orgy of mind-numbing waffle that surrounds its publication and reception. It is satirically sharp, genuinely insightful, and often hilarious.

More than this, Aaron Kent is a candid and nuanced chronicler of what it means to be working class in the twenty-first century. That is, to be irrevocably, painfully, and marvellously shaped by class; classed in our engagement with language and literary culture; in our encounters with each other and the world. The Working Classic is full of coruscating verbal parries, beautifully off kilter image-making, and moments of pained, serrated tenderness. It recognises and holds us, but with an eye and in a voice that is entirely its own. 

I don't doubt that The Working Classic will alienate and vex a number of people. It should. That's what good writing is for. 

   — Fran Lock

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each poem makes space for itself/feels almost like a new tone or language within poetry.

   — Andre Bagoo

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Aaron Kent’s pages made me experience, for the first time ever in my reading, the spaces between words as rips in fabric that let skin show through in its bruised and tender luminosity.

   — Anthony Vahni Capildeo

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A British force.

   — The Kenyon Review​

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Aaron Kent and Stuart McPherson’s All Empty Vessels is a multi-person conversation. Two men in conversation with imagination, language, illness, power and limitation. Back and forth, between the poets — whose friendship is evident in the collaboration — the reader is brought into the intimate space of confession, creativity, chaos and collaboration. This joint collection makes few promises, but the one it demonstrates is that even in emptiness, connection is a companion for All Empty Vessels. 

   — Pádraig Ó Tuama

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Kent's eye remains attentive to the particular, to how inequality affects the texture of experience.

   — John McCullough

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Such is Aaron Kent’s originality his work does not remind me of any other poet writing today whether working-class, political or otherwise.

   — Antony Owen

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Kent labors words with splendid matters [and] belongs to the abyssal world of invention from where a creative light emanates to aid the reader to illuminate his surroundings. So, all you need, reader, is reflection and absorbing in order to collect the splinters of your life. Analogy is not a metaphor. Down with thesaurus!

   — Abdul Kadeer El-Janabi

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Early on in reading Aaron Kent’s [work] I misread the word ‘energy’ for ‘elegy’. And I kept returning to my misreading: somehow, under the verve and pulse of these poems — sometimes furious with survival, othertimes confused by it — is the sound of someone speaking themselves back to life, someone who holds energy and elegy in a vital conversation.

   — Pádraig Ó Tuama

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Marvellous poetic volcanoes, Kent's poems are sprinting avalanches cautioned only by a tidal wave of dialectical incaution, just what the revolt of poetry should burn words with.

   — John Welson

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Obsequious in full funeral rigout, laburnum decor, with many choice aromas and childhood joys. Indeed alongside outbreaks of passionate attachment with parents and kids, the schedule is mostly immune to current political conflagrations and their drear localisms. The protocols display exceptional narrative candour, own-brand, also in white, offering vagaries of choice oddity, medical and arctic in well-tempered rational diffusion; anatomical by alternating reduction and upfront funny by marginal exploits; work and glancing damage on all sides, broken and 'racing to the bottom', where else.

   — J H Prynne

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The boundless and ferocious energy of Aaron Kent’s poems is tempered by a mordant knife edge wit and keen observation of our dystopic human moment. Through this runs a thread of lyric beauty, revelatory in its profound joy and grace. A deep awareness of mortality haunts each page, as does the long process of recovery from illness.

These Selected Poems reveal a poet of wide reach, intent and purpose, with poems that amaze, challenge, and rip away assumptions. We meet foxes purring about redemption, we sail the long river of the unconscious. We share the pain of the poet’s insomnia, which he renders with vehement clarity, we go into pubs armed with boxing gloves and a can of socialism. These poems ready us for everything.

The poet says there are more cops in this world than dreams. Our over regulated unequal society is a main source of concern here. The poet shows the hard scrabble of life where the economic dice is cast against the majority of us; he speaks with earned anger and comprehension of the realities of social deprivation, locating some of his poems in Redruth, West Cornwall, where he grew up. This is an area that despite being flagged up as part of Cornwall’s tourist paradise is, in reality, a community still battling post-industrial decline.

The complex webwork of familial relationship generational memory, and dialogue with the past gives these poems additional impact. Throughout, an imagination is at full stretch, and craft and confidence is at work in every line.

   — Penelope Shuttle
 

Aaron Kent has created a densely woven and yet philosophically ‘open’ poetics of confrontation. Steeped in a vital, sometimes grim but always rejuvenating irony, he offers a manifesto of survival wrought out of loss.

Constantly challenging the discreet charms and the exclusions created by class oppression, he has given us poems that embody love, parenthood, marriage, body and environment, to guide us towards complex ways of understanding physical and conceptual health.

Uniquely but socially voiced, this is a committed poetics of necessity in which language bends around opposition to work the alternatives and find a way through inclemency. The nests may be vulnerable, but knowing how they might persist in a toxic environment increases the prospects for life and maybe even some forms of liberty. These are linguistically disruptive and innovative ‘personal’ poems with an underlying public conscience.

There’s a weird addiction to life while things constantly threaten to unravel. Resisting the privileged operators’ schemes to make things even more their way, ‘the scum’ finds a way to float out of range, creating a poetry of refusal, a poetics of opposition to class control.

This is poetry at a slant to privilege. Precarious as ‘the image’ itself, life under pressure persists against the investments of class distinction, working to foil the hazards created by the wealthy. This is also a poetry about reclaiming the damaged body.

   — John Kinsella

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Aaron takes us on a journey that is as vital as it is extravagant, urging us into the fantastic, and turning our everyday scenes into glittering vistas.

   — Theophilus Kwek

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Kent shows us what it means to look into the self, its depths.

   — Robert Peake