We are excited to announce our first poetry reading of the year! We welcome the brilliant Francis Jones, alongside a cohort of extraordinary young writers, to launch their new chapbook from Veer2, STORM DRAIN! Reading alongside Francis will be: Hesse K, Shola von Reinhold, Maya Uppal, Robert Kiely.

Francis Jones is a poet and writer from Ireland. In 2024 their collaborative exhibition with Josie Perry The Thieves was exhibited at CCA Glasgow’s Intermedia Gallery, with an accompanying anthology. In 2023 they wrote a poem-film in collaboration with Jack Hogan titled I Thought I Hated U, Moon Snail which has been screened at the Whitney ISP final exhibition, New York, Colloquium Unpopular Culture at NYU, Temple Bar Gallery and Studios, Dublin and Starling, Limerick throughout 2023 and 2024. Their debut pamphlet of poetry, sacrificial fabric was published by SPAM in 2021. Their poetry is usually about love and sex, class and work, and relies on experiment and collaboration to be interesting and good. They now live in London.

Praise for STORM DRAIN

“With the vertiginous glitter of sunlit concrete and fluted, addictive syntax, Storm Drain is both a gutter and a fountain for the work-weary and atmospherically-curious dreamers and lovers of this world. The mice and rats of language ecstatically shirk from landlords and bosses in its fugitive waters, and urchins seize the means of daytime as tokens against despair. These are poems dialled into both ancestral impossibility and the magic trick of torquing stolen time and waged nothings into lyric possibility. With lush and attuned dexterity, Francis Jones can swerve from the harmonics of mud and skirting boards at the faint edge of perceptibility, to a heart-in-the-throat directness that continually leaves me in awe.”

–– Daisy LaFarge, author of Lovebug, Paul and Life Without Air

“STORM DRAIN just goes and goes and goes and goes. Francis Jones has produced something unrelentingly generous, unhesitatingly devotional –– to language, to friendship, to a furtive liberatory obstinance. This is an irascible lyric that refuses any thoughtlessness: despite or rather because of the blunt and sublimation of wage-work, grief, colonial reverberation. And at the centre? A wavering, exacting body, struck like a tuning fork … forever curious, sounding. No fixity but the electric clarity of a million indisputable sensations! No surety but the eternal dignity of the working class! This book churns and chokes me. I gag on it, I gag!”

–– Hesse K, author of Disquiet Drive

“Francis Jones’ poetry captures the imperceptible visions and fleeting qualities of life—those slivers of time lost to the enormity of existence. To read Jones’ work is to inhabit the present, that paradoxical space where faint beauty stands against the relentlessly bleaching force of capital. It evokes a remembrance of times to come, a stance against the dazzling future and all of its potential horrors. Francis Jones wills me to keep existing, to embody my own degeneracy, vulgarity, and fragility as acts of defiance against the many suffocating forces of neofascism. Pride grows within me, echoing from my mind into the world. Each line, each section of this beautiful collection, offers grace—allowing us to feel blessed, to feel loved, and to hold hope for a beautiful, liberated future.”

–– Isaac Harris, author of Ghetty Gospel

This a free event, however, money raised from ticket sales will be going to aid Political Prisoners from Palestine Action. If you would like to donate please see the ticket options below. Otherwise use the RSVP link below that to book a free ticket.

Feel free to byob.