Dirty Laundry

'A JOLT TO THE MAINSTREAM'

- The Guardian, about Issue One

Welcome to the second Pocket Aftershock.

Small enough to slip in your pocket.

Still an Aftershock.

Dirty Laundry is a working-class queer reckoning. A long silken kiss of a collection where extravagance and economy lie together and maybe fabulously shag, or maybe not.

These poems carry the outrageous courage of their language; they are a clothesline strung across an alley (with sequinned hotpants). They come from club nights and corridors, from bedrooms and back seats, from the places where queerness is lived before it is named. They sit inside the moment where desire, shame, tenderness and survival meet - not cleaned up, not made palatable, not turned into something safer.

Queer here is not singular. It screeches, scratches, wounds and soars. It holds peace. It holds quiet. It holds roar. This pamphlet is an excavation. A working-class examination of voices that have too often been buried, misheard or made to disappear. Voices that insist on being seen, on being felt, on being heard in their full complexity.

Edited by Gerry Potter, and Max Wallis who helped shape the arc, Dirty Laundry brings together poems that refuse silence, refuse erasure, and refuse to come clean.