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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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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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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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 ‘Circadian Rhythm Fashion Week’ 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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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