Books by Julian Flanagan

Kitchen, 12.07 a.m., is the second collection of poems by Julian Flanagan (1962-2018). Many first appeared in magazines such as The Spectator, Ambit, The Rialto, The Reader, Envoi, Iota, and The Manchester Review. His poems have been short-listed in the Teignmouth Festival and Plough Poetry Prizes.Mario Petrucci described Flanagan's first collection as "Flecked with arresting imagery, Cooking with Cancer looks and looks again…it refuses to flinch."His poems can be celebratory, elegiac, or pithy - Apart We tap text, puncture separation with a line of drill heads: xxxxxPreacher-haunted motorways lie beside sleeping queen bees waiting to govern; a baby struggles through her first breaths; the Tardis jumps a middle-aged man back to his Cheshire childhood; a lawnmower cuts the air in a Jamaican stairwell; a boiler ticks reassuringly through the small hours.

Cooking with Cancer is poetry served up in the form of a menu: Starters, Main Course, Afters, Digestif.This poetic chronicle, spiked with humour, leads the reader through an unpredictable odyssey as cancer interrupts life and life interrupts cancer, as loyalty and belief are tested, and as the author is ambushed by the idiosyncrasies and changing ages of love.