Tom Sastry Books

What to do when everything goes up in flames? Summon up Tom Sastrys poems, with all their elegant, satirical and hurt-quenching here are nightmares and fairytales, museums full of regret, misenchantments and magic for dark times. Whilst the accelerants of complicity and violence seep from these exacting poems, Sastrys wit and stoicism slake the bonfire of modern troubles. They defiantly ask why do the great marquees of England stand empty? How old is your heart? Why arent we listening to the sea, and what it has to say? Funny, marvellously frank and often courageous, A Mans House Catches Fire urges us to take a long hard look into the flames and avert the disasters of the heart, home and nations that threaten to befall us all. This much anticipated debut collection by poet Tom Sastry follows on from his pamphlet Complicity, selected by Carol Ann Duffy for the Poetry Business Laureates Choice and awarded the Poetry Book Society Pamphlet Choice. Unafraid to address large political and social concerns as well as smaller personal ones, this is an emotionally complex debut with a great deal of charm and freshness about it. Jacqueline Saphra on Complicity

Tom Sastry was born in 1974. He is a second generation Original. His mother is Originally English and his father Originally Indian. He grew up in Buckinghamshire and has lived in Bristol since 1999. He thinks that not belonging is more interesting than belonging. He has spent most of his life in bedrooms, classrooms and offices. He enjoys having to deny that he is an anarchist. Complicity is his first pamphlet. "Tom Sastry navigates the mysterious everyday in this honest and often funny collection, making friendships and love affairs new and strange." Carol Ann Duffy

In You have no normal country to return to, Tom Sastry explores questions of national identity and 'the end of history'. A blistering, bleakly funny and timely second poetry collection, following his Seamus Heaney First Collection Prize shortlisted, A Man's House Catches Fire. By turns crisply satirical and questioning, You have no normal country to return to ranges across the legacies of Empire, postwar migration and the current crisis in English identity. Sastry's precise, brilliantly attuned poetry asks how the times we live in and the tales we tell about them affect us; how our emotional landscapes are shaped by national myths and the more personal stories we tell about ourselves. It is a book about illusion, and discovering, again and again, that what was once taken for granted was never really there; a guidebook for an age of "enchantments collapsing on themselves".