Love Minus Love

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.