This Fruiting Body

Caleb Parkin's debut poetry collection, This Fruiting Body, plunges us into octopus raves and Sega Megadrive oceans, in the company of Saab hermit crabs and ASDA pride gnomes. It's a playful invitation to a queer ecopoetics that permeates our bodies and speech, our gardens, homes, and city suburbs. It reintroduces us to a Nature we've dragged up until it's unrecognisable.
Parkin's perceptive poetry sparks with neon visuals, engaged in the joyful, urgent, imagining of alternative realities and new futures. How might we relate queerly and dearly to our environment and its shared conundrums? These adventurous poems delight in human and nonhuman intimacies, teem with life, ponder bug sex and put masculinities under the microscope. This Fruiting Body roves our grandiloquent planet, embracing our kinships with matter, culture, creatures and drag-mother Earth herself.

Caleb Parkin has poems in The Guardian, The Rialto, The Poetry Review and was guest poet on BBC Radio 4's Poetry Please. His debut collection, This Fruiting Body, was longlisted for the Laurel Prize 2022. He's published three pamphlets: 'Wasted Rainbow' (tall-lighthouse), 'All the Cancelled Parties' (collected City Poet commissions) and 'The Coin' (Broken Sleep). He tutors for Poetry Society, Poetry School, Cheltenham Festivals, First Story, Arvon, and holds an MSc in Creative Writing for Therapeutic Purposes (CWTP). From 2023, he's a practice-as-research PhD candidate at University of Exeter, as part of RENEW Biodiversity.