The Working Classic is a collection of poetry, interviews, and essays with Aaron Kent. These diverse texts attempt to showcase how a gentrified creative industry routinely ignores working class voices unless that voice is an act of appropriation by a middle or upper class individual. Through a history of struggling with his own accent and upbringing, Kent showcases a working class poetics that aims to present both a reality of experience and a subversion of expectations. The interviews, essays, and reviews of Kent's work are a hostile depiction of how establishment arts attempt to set out the guidelines under which working class voices are allowed to participate, while the poems prove that working class voices can offer more than schadenfreude.
This body of poems, fictional interviews and reviews sees Aaron Kent target social inequality through a shuffling of reality. The moon is arrested for non-violent protest while one defiant speaker declares 'I am sometimes a song'. The legion of alternative selves here are resourceful, prepared to 'Instrument the silence' and reveal 'the amount of light in an ending'. The results are spectacular, classism and gentrification exposed from a dynamic array of angles. Ferocious, intimate, important. - John McCullough, Panic Response
To wake from the simulation that seems to equate its power with surcease. Aaron Kent's The Working Classic can be nothing other than existential kinetic as neo-renewal as liberation from the class stamped rigidities of generational inbred British boundedness. -Will Alexander, Refractive Africa
A definite classic; Kent continues to find new words and new forms to peel back the layers of the self. Non-linear, unpredictable and always surprising, this is a book only Kent could conceive of , and certainly one that nobody else could write - Andrew McMillan, 100 Queer Poems (co-editor)
There are books that UK poetry needs, and there are books that UK poetry deserves. Needs, like the salvation of its soul. Deserves, like a smack in the face with a Millwall brick. The Working Classic is both. It is, amongst other things, an incisive and playful engagement with what poetry is, to whom it belongs, and with the endless orgy of mind-numbing waffle that surrounds its publication and reception. It is satirically sharp, genuinely insightful, and often hilarious. More than this, Aaron Kent is a candid and nuanced chronicler of what it means to be working class in the twenty-first century. That is, to be irrevocably, painfully, and marvellously shaped by class; classed in our engagement with language and literary culture; in our encounters with each other and the world. The Working Classic is full of coruscating verbal parries, beautifully off kilter image-making, and moments of pained, serrated tenderness. It recognises and holds us, but with an eye and in a voice that is entirely its own. I don't doubt that The Working Classic will alienate and vex a number of people. It should. That's what good writing is for.
- Fran Lock White/Other
For Fans Of: J. H. Prynne, Vladimir Mayakovsky, Anthony Anaxagorou