Up Late by Nick Laird Matthew Sweeney if we can eliminate our

if we can eliminate our own warring needs

ruthlessly focused pieces – vicious and scabrous political sketches and satires charting the growth of extremism and the disintegration of democracy – are meditations on the imaginative life

of the world's problems and the twisted inventions we create

and playful subversion

Up Late by Nick Laird Matthew Sweeney if we can eliminate ourA powerful new collection from one of our leading contemporary poets, reflecting the strange and chaotic times we live in. Reeling in the face of collapsing systems, of politics and identity and the absurdities of reality TV, Nick Laird confronts age old anxieties, questions of aloneness, of friendship, the push and pull of daily life. At the books heart lies the title sequence, a profound meditation on a fathers dying, the reverberations of which