Tom Jenks

Tom Jenks is based in Manchester, where he is a member of the experimental poetry scene. He has published six full poetry collections, two chapbooks and various online and audiovisual works. His last major audiovisual work was a collaboration with S. J. Fowler entitled The Wit and Wisdom of Nigel Farage (European Poetry Festival, Manchester 2018), which comprises film footage and quotations from the former UKIP leader. Jenks’s most recent book is A Long and Hard Night Troubled by Visions (if p then q, 2018), a collection of prose poems such as ‘strikes’, which documents every instance of smoking in the second series of Mad Men, the US television series set in the world of advertising in the 1960s. The poem ‘chickens’ also comes from that collection.

I’d been down south too long. My hands were soft and white and I’d started to take off my shoes without first untying the laces. If people asked me what I did I answered variously fisheries, online cosmetics or industrial espionage. I slept in budget hotels. I read Dickens and mastered the recorder, but spent longer and longer lying fully clothed on my bed, listlessly Googling myself or transcribing episodes of Kittens Make You Laugh Out Loud on headed paper, dropping these documents into confidential waste before breakfast the following morning. I slept little, pained by dreams of the north, its snowy mountains and superior drinking water. One day I would return. I would sit in the supermarket café by the sea, the one with the salad bar and whole rotisserie chickens.