COWS by Ben Redhead
115 x 195mm, 32 pages, Black & white printing, Saddle stitched, Letterpressed softcover, Edition of 100, 2025
Cows and other poems is a collection of recent poems by Ben Redhead.
Ben Redhead is a writer originally from Leeds, who has lived a third of his life in Glasgow, and is now based in Marseille. He has previously had work published by Worms Magazine, Sticky Fingers and Death of Workers While Building Skyscrapers. Cows and other poems is his debut pamphlet.
Erudite poetry emerges from the darkness of dreams. Redhead’s debut is where "letters go blind" —a penumbral precision, a lyric register built like a bothy: austere yet lit with conscience. Sensibility is awake here, embodied in verse both elemental and exact. There are flax-field passions and city cowsheds; a rural roughness meeting a busy sidewalk fag-end. It is poetry that roams the earth as it remembers the mind.
— Eleanor Tennyson
It takes a particular kind of poet to come up with “someone was handing out relief to all / but it’s blame-poisoned / as soon as you touch it it’s your fault”. And yet reading Ben Redhead’s pamphlet involves the quick realization that you have stumbled upon this illusive- whispered-
— Leo Bussi
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