An exciting and ambitious debut, this collection explores countries and languages through the eyes of youth and loss. It plays with ideas of tradition, lightly evoking significant themes, with a bow to pulp culture. Moving between real places, such as Russia, Spain, and North Korea, these poems also journey through virtual environments, memories, and dreams.

Longlisted for the 2018 International Dylan Thomas Prize. On Trust: A Book of Lies, James Womack's second collection of poems, is organised around the notion of telling the truth. Working against ideas of poetry as a vehicle for displaying individual truths or unprocessed confessions, these poems play hilariously, earnestly, undecidedly, with such simple identifications as the `I' of a poem with the `I' of the poet, offering us monologues which seem to be sincere, unvarnished accounts of things that have `really' happened, but which twist and escape any absolute statements of identity....