Peter Barlow’s Cigarette at the Carlton Club

For Peter Barlow’s Cigarette #47, our favourite “afternoon of alternative poetries”, the organising team – Tim Allen, Joey Frances and Rachel Sills – have invited Nat Raha, Nia Davies and Sam Commotion along to read.

Nat Raha is a poet and lecturer in Fine Art Critical Studies at the Glasgow School of Art. Her poetry is of an experimental queer lyric, attending to hirstories of struggle and resistance to racial capitalism, through de/re/materialising sound, form and syntax, on the page and in performance. apparitions (nines) came out with Nightboat Books in late 2024; she has also published of sirens, body & faultlines (Boiler House Press, 2018), and countersonnets (Contraband Books, 2013). Nat’s work is anthologised in 100 Queer Poems We Want It All: An Anthology of Radical Trans Poetics. Her poetry has been translated in numerous languages. Performance work includes epistolary (on carceral islands), co-commissioned by Edinburgh Art Festival and TULCA Festival of Visual Arts, Galway, 2023. Recent critical writing appears in Queer Print in Europe, Transgender Marxism, New Feminist Literary Studies and Third Text (‘Imagining Queer Europe then and now’, 2021). With Mijke van der Drift, Nat is co-author of Trans Femme Futures: Abolitionist Ethics for Transfeminist Worlds (Pluto Press, 2024), co-editor of Radical Transfeminism zine, and co-author of the article ‘“They would plant the rose garden themselves”: Femmeness, Complicity, Solidarity’, published in Social Text.

Cast your mind back, and you may remember No Matter, and Nia Davies was on the bill in 2018 for the fourth outing of that fabulous feminist avant-garde offering. Nia Davies is a poet and researcher based in Wales/Cymru. Her second collection of poems was published by Bloodaxe in October, so this is part of the extended tour around that. Votive Mess is a study in the altered states of performance, travel, masks, comedy, learning and love. The book contains some unfinished experiments in liminality, small rebellions against exhaustion and alienation, lingual brambles, shabby theatre and drowsy love letters. Nia’s previous publications include All fours (2017), editorship of Poetry Wales (2014-2019) and co-curation of the Poetry Emergency festivals. She is currently an interdisciplinary researcher at the University of Swansea and part of the experimental curatorial collective NAWR.

Sam Commotion, we are told, should hopefully be putting out his first little self-published pamphlet right here at the event, so be sure to save some of your chip money for that. You may have spotted Sam Commotion reading at the PBC open mic annual event, and he has contributed “bits of writing” (his words) to various zines, websites and things, pretty much all pseudonymously or anonymously. No Argument Against Their Uselessness is his first poetry collection.