A Times Literary Supplement Book of the Year 2020
A Telegraph Book of the Year 2020

In Squid Squad: A Novel we join Natalie Chatterley, Angus Mingus, Nerys Harris and friends as they make recordings of the doorbell, uncrumple their cash and fling their walnuts from the window. They contemplate the spaces between the spaces between things and compare the rhythm of rhetoric to the rhetoric of rhythm, while around them chickens feed on chestnuts, nuthatches nest in bicycle baskets, and budgerigars sulk themselves to sleep.
The second half features shorter stand-alone poems. Here, poetic form is given a playful reworking: a poem to be spoken in a single breath, a poem made entirely of questions, a series of three poems in the form of university mark schemes, and poems that explore the possibilities of the list as a verse form.

'There's a melancholy undertow to his humour: taken together, these poems come to feel like glimpses into the Eleanor Rigby-ish private lives of all the lonely people, as they sit at home, playing with peanut shells, drawing on the walls, lost in tangled thoughts, doing nothing.'
Tristram Fane Saunders, The Telegraph

'Welton's tuning-fork sentences make small things sing with precise beauty'
Jeremy Noel-Tod, The Sunday Times

'Welton is a poet who resists the idea of a stable, complete, consumable poem, as his iterative patterns of poems (in a book that calls itself 'a novel') show - and certainly, both books are short on satisfaction, questioning in different ways what poetic satisfaction might be. The mimed actions, like unoriginal incorrect versions of ancient epigrams, seem to take us to the brink of textual meaning, again and again, and then leave us there, like cartoon coyotes, scrabbling in midair.'
The Poetry Review

'Through Welton's abundant assonance and alliteration, through the accents and rhythms of his syntax, sensations become linguistically tangible... Welton probes ordinary micro-phenomena to reveal the ineffable... Throughout Squid Squad, the reader is in the company of an acute observer and expert linguist turning his attention to his own use of language. Welton is without peer when it comes to putting slow motion perceptions into words'
Nasser Hussain, Times Literary Supplement

'A beautiful, exactly written piece of nonsense-noir'
Keith Miller, TLS Books of the Year 2020

'No book this year has brought me more joy.'
Tristram Fane Saunders, Telegraph Poetry Books of the Year 2020

Matthew Welton was born in 1969 in Nottingham, where he now lives and teaches at the University. He is the author of four previous books with Carcanet, and a number of pamphlets from smaller presses. His poems take a playful approach to poetic form, and much of his writing has been made in collaboration with composers, artists and other poets. Author photo credit: Jack Tinney.