warm blooded things

By Shaun Hill

Shaun Hill's debut poetry collection,warm blooded things is a radical and intimate encounter with boyhood, sexuality, and violence, love, desire and solitude. Wandering the nocturnal city streets, through random encounters, co-opting space and capturing conversations in a multitude of voices, this collection evokes alienation whilst longing for tenderness.
Hill's agile poems are alive to fear, loss and danger. The poems also explore a uniquely queer archive of time and place, the legacy of AIDS, and draw strength from giving voice to unheard histories. Seeking sanctuary and alternatives to a capitalist reality, these precise poems gesture towards hope, survival and the necessity to be responsible for one another.
"Shaun Hill is one of my favourite performers, his poems charged with vulnerability and raw intimacy. Now warm blooded things offers us this same tender gift."– Liz Berry

• Language: English
• Publisher: Nine Arches Press
• Release date: Dec 2, 2021
• ISBN: 9781913437220

Shaun Hill

Shaun Hill is a queer writer exploring post-capitalist ways of being. He is a recipient of an Apples and Snakes | Jerwood Arts Poetry in Performance Award for 2020. Shaun has shared his words widely at festivals across the UK and has facilitated for a range of organisations including: Birmingham Buddhist Centre, City of Culture, and Out on the Page. He has completed commissions for Overhear, SHOUT, Verve Poetry Festival, and appeared on BBC Radio 4. Thirty of his poems have been published, in anthologies such as Eighty-Four: Poems on Male Suicide, and magazines like Magma and StreetCake. warm blooded things is his first collection.

Book preview

maps of light

we sacrifice so much to survive.

use fingers as weak shields for the face.

we can’t grow limbs back like a salamander can.

but we can go back and gather. whisper: I am so lucky.

we are the descendants of plants. a million

different paths mapping the mathematics of light.

cut this stem you’ve stepped into. see how it isn’t stone.

now turn it. find an edge. don’t dig yourself a death yet.

there is someone inside you who never left.

gripping the carpet of your lungs.

waiting alone in the dark.

I.

castaway

all those nights alone. barely

dipping your feet in the living

room you were tethered to.

bulb in remote

blinking morse code –

but you couldn’t see it.

you forced your mind

through glass in hope

you’d float to the other side.

group-sleep aboard the night-ship to Coventry

in a glass dome at the edge of the world,

that’s where you’ll find him:

splitting mist as he steers this

steel forge toward sleep.

past the green blur of a service

with tin barbeques in stacks;

gold arches, the promise

of high-fat happiness.

past the swiped screen of towerblocks,

their pixelated faces;

into a red-eyed sky-line

of offices, cranes –

wishing at his window seat

he could dissolve and discover love.

but then who would ride the night-ship?

kick-drum the rhythm of the night shift?

hear the black ticking hand strain

to wipe away the rain?

burnt bulbs

rows of seats like black teeth in a dead shark’s