About Aaron Kent
Aaron Kent is an award-winning poet and publisher from Cornwall, though he currently lives in Wales with his wife, Emma and their two young children. Aaron is a working-class writer, and particularly wants to advocate for more working-class voices in literature. He had several poetry pamphlets published, his debut collection, Angels the Size of Houses, is available from Shearsman Books, and his 2nd collection, The Working Classic, is available with the87press.
He has had work published in Poetry London, Poetry Wales, The Rialto, Prototype, The North, The Scores, Wild Court, Blackbox Manifold, Butchers Dog, BAX (2020), and Prelude among others.
Aaron's poems have been translated into Hungarian, Cymraeg (Welsh), Spanish. German, Persian, Cornish (Kernewek), French, and Latvian.
You can email him at aaronkent1989@gmail.com or follow him on Twitter where he is more than happy to chat about poetry, literature, jazz, hip hop, coffee, tv, and the works of J H Prynne.
Selected Publications
2023: The Working Classic
2022: A Requiem for Bioluminescence (w/ John Welson)
2022: The Rise Of...
2021: Collected Pamphlets
2021: Angels the size of Houses
2021: My Glorious Sundays
2020: Harbour Equinox
2020: Melatonin Spring Collection
2019: The Last Hundred
2018: Tertiary Colours
2018: Bampy
2018: The Rink
Selected Poems: (Click to read)
Poems at The Abandoned Playground
Dear Mother, You're Dying [Wild Court]
Splendid Giants [Blackbox Manifold]
Bone Idol [The Scores]
Morning in Retrograde [Prelude]
The Mountain's Ugly Head [Prelude]
Minor Bones, Restructured [Anthropocene]
Praise
Unicorn Flavoured.
- J H Prynne
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
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
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
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
each poem makes space for itself/feels almost like a new tone or language within poetry.
- Andre Bagoo
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
A British force.
- The Kenyon Review
Kent's eye remains attentive to the particular, to how inequality affects the texture of experience.
- John McCullough
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
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
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
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
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
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
Kent shows us what it means to look into the self, its depths.
- Robert Peake
Achievements
2023: The Guardian Poetry Book of the Year listing: Anne-Thology
2023: Winner of the Saboteur Publishing Award
2023: Winner of the Holyer an Gof award for poetry
2022: Nominated for National Poet of Wales
2021: Nominated, as a publisher, for the Callum Macdonald Memorial Award
2021: Nominated for a Jerwood Compton Fellowship
2020: Michael Marks Publishing Award winner
2020: Survived a brain haemorrhage
2020: Recipient of the Awen medal
2019: Longlisted for Live Canon International Poetry Prize
2018: Shortlisted for Aesthetica Creative Writing Award
2017: Longlisted for Saboteur Awards
Education
Masters Degree: Film & TV (Falmouth University)
Bachelors Degree: BA (Hons) English Literature with Creative Writing,
Upper 2:1 (Falmouth University)
Post Graduate Certificate in Education (Truro College)
