COFIO NIGEL

Also at this event, CJ Wagstaff will launch his new book – COLT, published by the H’mm Foundation. JC is the winner of Nigel’s award 2024.

The event is organised by the H’mm Foundation, Cover To Cover Bookshop and Swansea University Creative Writing.

‘On the surface of it, this pamphlet shares, with poets like James Wright and Seamus Heaney, the appreciation of and intimacy with the natural world. The thread that skilfully interrupts the pamphlet is that we’re asked continually to reckon with nature as a tension, between life and death, beauty and mess, and the fundamental struggle of each human body to find its own natural state. Many pamphlets are called ‘unflinching’, but Colt stares life in the face, examines it, craves to understand.’
Alan Kellermann, author of You, Me and the Birds

‘CJ Wagstaff’s many talents align like stars in this tumultuous and accomplished debut. Whisper-close, we are drawn into an intimate lyric journey, the taming and re-wilding of a fledgling voice ‘lifting on the gyre of its own potential.’ Playful, meditative and powerful, Colt asks who we become when the places we belong to and the bodies we inhabit find ways to transform: the answers sing with queer joy.’
Katrina Moinet, author of Portrait of a Young Girl Falling

‘CJ Wagstaff balances lyric intensity with delicate humour, creating a world both bruised and deeply alive. COLT is a vivid, emotionally charged body of poetry that explores memory, queerness, illness, desire, class, ecology, and place through sharply observed encounters with animals, bodies, and landscapes. The poems move between childhood recollection, familial intimacy, sexual vulnerability, grief, and environmental unease. Horses, fish, foxes, birds, waterways, and damaged ecosystems recur as mirrors for human longing and instability. Across moments of tenderness, absurdity, loneliness, and bodily transformation, an exciting new voice is searching for belonging amid decay and change – a stunning debut from a Welsh poet we are sure to hear a lot of in years to come.’
Taz Rahman, author of East of the Sun, West of the Moon

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

CJ Wagstaff is a queer poet, writer and musician from Neath in South Wales. His work has been published by The Aftershock Review, Seren Books, Propel Magazine, Poetry Wales and others. He is a recipient of the 2024 Nigel Jenkins Award and is currently completing a PhD in creative nonfiction. This is his first pamphlet.

All welcome - a free event.