This Fruiting Body

By Caleb Parkin

Caleb Parkin’s debut poetry collection, This Fruiting Body, plunges us into octopus raves and Sega Megadrive oceans, in the company of Saab hermit crabs and ASDA pride gnomes. It’s a playful invitation to a queer ecopoetics that permeates our bodies and speech, our gardens, homes, and city suburbs. It reintroduces us to a Nature we’ve dragged up until it’s unrecognisable.

Parkin’s perceptive poetry sparks with neon visuals, engaged in the joyful, urgent, imagining of alternative realities and new futures. How might we relate queerly and dearly to our environment and its shared conundrums? These adventurous poems delight in human and nonhuman intimacies, teem with life, ponder bug sex and put masculinities under the microscope. This Fruiting Body roves our grandiloquent planet, embracing our kinships with matter, culture, creatures and drag-mother Earth herself.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Nine Arches Press
• Release date: Oct 14, 2021
• ISBN: 9781913437268

Caleb Parkin

Caleb Parkin, Bristol City Poet 2020 - 22, won second prize in the National Poetry Competition 2016, the Winchester Poetry Prize 2017 and other competition shortlists. His poems are published in The Rialto, The Poetry Review, Under the Radar, Poetry Wales, Magma, Butcher’s Dog, Lighthouse and elsewhere. Caleb tutors for Poetry Society, Poetry School, Cheltenham Festivals and First Story and holds an MSc in Creative Writing for Therapeutic Purposes (CWTP). He previously worked in BBC TV and Radio production, as a teacher and Senior Inclusion Worker. He lives in a human-canine pack in suburban Bristol. His debut pamphlet, Wasted Rainbow, was published with tall-lighthouse in February 2021. This Fruiting Body is his debut collection.