Wayne Holloway-Smith's second collection Love Minus Love is an internal universe, fragmented and glued back together with uncanny logic. A strange layering of time, in which multiple things happen at once, in a looping track of intrusive thoughts - shot through with dead cows, pop songs, dead dads, the white noise of televisions - rotten teeth are raining everywhere. Somewhere at the core of all this, the seemingly fixed boundaries of masculinity, family, trauma and mental health are blurred towards a new type of vinegary identity, in a pitch of emotional intensity that punches you right in the gut. Wayne Holloway-Smith's debut collection Alarum was shortlisted for the Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry Prize and the Roehampton Poetry Prize as well as being a Poetry Book Society Wild Card Choice. His poem 'the posh mums are dancing in the square' - included in Love Minus Love - won first prize in the Poetry Society's 2018 National Poetry Competition. Love Minus Love is shortlisted for the 2020 T.S. Eliot Prize and is also a Poetry Book Society Wild Card Choice.

About the Author
Wayne Holloway-Smith was born in Wiltshire and lives in London. His first book-length collection, Alarum (Bloodaxe Books, 2017) was a Poetry Book Society Wildcard Choice for Winter 2017, was shortlisted for the Roehampton Poetry Prize 2017 and the Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry Prize for First Full Collection 2018, and longlisted for the 2019 Michael Murphy Memorial Prize for a distinctive first book of poetry. The final poem in the collection, 'Short', won the Geoffrey Dearmer Prize 2016. His book of poetry, I CAN'T WAIT FOR THE WENDING, was published by Test Centre Publications in 2018. He won the National Poetry Competition 2018 for 'the posh mums are boxing in the square' from his second book-length book of poetry, Love Minus Love (Bloodaxe Books, 2020). Love Minus Love is shortlisted for the 2020 T.S. Eliot Prize and is also a Poetry Book Society Wild Card Choice.

Reviews
I rejoice in Wayne Holloway-Smith's poems, and I miss them when I'm not reading them. Love Minus Love is a gorgeous painful classic of the Dead Dad genre, and the We Are All Meat genre and the Re-Building Mum genre. It is a beautiful tapestry-album of boy agony, wit and honesty, punctuated by devastating in-parentheses-bildungsromans. It's unforgettably brilliant. -- Max Porter
Exciting, excoriating, gorgeous, appalling, and eye-wateringly honest. Wayne Holloway-Smith's poems are blisteringly beautiful, and probe at a siege-like nucleus of familial harm. Histories of abuse, hurt and disease are confronted and dissected in all their messy, meaty complexity, but always with love, always with hope and a sweet, sweet tenderness. One of the truest poets writing today. -- Fiona Benson



Book Information
ISBN 9781780375083
Author Wayne Holloway-Smith
Format Paperback
Page Count 64
Imprint Bloodaxe Books Ltd
Publisher Bloodaxe Books Ltd