Poetry Book Society Recommendation "His harsh, violent verses have come to terms with life in contemporary Britain in the front line. They are clever, witty, inventive, slangy, funny and serious...You come looking for a poet, and he does not disappoint". -- The Times. For twenty-five years Peter Reading has been one of Britain's most original and controversial poets: angry, uncompromising, gruesomely ironic, hilarious and heart-breaking -- as funny as he is disconcerting. He is probably the most skillful and technically inventive poet writing today, mixing the matter and speech of the gutter with highly sophisticated metrical and syllabic patterns to produce scathing and grotesque accounts of lives blighted by greed, meanness, ignorance, political ineptness, and cultural impoverishment.