We are delighted to celebrate the publication of Explosives Licence, local poet Jonathan Totman’s debut pamphlet, and a winner of the 2018 IOTA Shot Pamphlet Awards. His poems explore our responses to profound disruptions in our lives: the ghosts that inhabit our surroundings and relationships; the licences we give ourselves to talk and stay silent; the rituals drawing us closer and compulsions driving us apart. Jonathan was the Fenland Poet Laureate for 2015 and co-founded The Fenland Reed, a magazine for new writing, in the same year. Explosives Licence is his debut pamphlet and he will be reading from it in the intimate setting of the Bookshop.
There is darkness here, at “the needling heart” –
but there are also fireworks.