Adventures in poetry
Life expectancy begins to fall
Tom Sastry
ISBN: 9781916760127
eISBN: 9781916760134
Price: £11.99
Publication date: 20th March 2025
Format: Paperback / eBook
Territories: World
Extent: 72pp
DCF: Poetry Collections
Is your retirement plan dying in the climate wars? Are you getting on with things in the meantime? Life expectancy begins to fall is a book of poems about how it feels to normalise an apocalypse.
It is not a call to arms, it is a poet’s book about the weight we all carry –uncompromisingly curious, emotional and authentic.
Praise for previous poetry by Tom Sastry:
“A magician of deadpan” – Hera Lindsay Bird
“incisive, witty, surreal, truthful” – Amy Acre
"Tom Sastry navigates the mysterious everyday...making friendships and love affairs new and strange" - Carol Ann Duffy
About the author:
Tom Sastry is political, ironic, emotional, morbid and funny in all the wrong places. He has published two previous collections (both with Nine Arches) and one pamphlet. These have been (variously) Poetry School Book of the Year, Poetry Book Society pamphlet choice, highly commended in the Forward Prize and shortlisted for the Seamus Heaney First Collection Prize.
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. Tom Sastry’s precise, brilliantly attuned poetry; 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”.
Find out about You have no normal country to return to
The Nine Arches Press blog features poems from many of our poets, as well as interviews and articles.