Ahren Warner's second collection of poems opens with the sequence Lutece, te amo: a raw paean to the Paris it inhabits that flits between past and present and offers both adoration and horror in equal measure. Elsewhere, London 'licks and laps'; an anonymous man 'works his bones with a micro-plane' and translations of Baudelaire and Kojeve rub shoulders with Kurt Cobain and 'Little Lord Tory-Tit'. More capricious, fleshly and darker than Warner's previous work, Pretty culminates in Nervometer: thirteen poems hovering between a collage, translation and performance of Antonin Artaud's Le Pese-nerfs, which bring Pretty to a beautifully ugly end.

Theatrical, toxic and oddly gorgeous… Warner moves from playful social observation, through reflections on memory and artifice, to a near-Baudelairean spleen, his games with language and ideas as serious in their investigations of the given world as any philosophy. -- John Burnside * Poetry Book Society Bulletin *
Witty and wide-ranging… Ahren Warner has a claim to be the "poet's poet" of his generation. Even in apparently domestic and personal guise, he's a writer whose work conveys voluptuous but intelligent delight in language and technique. -- Carol Rumens * Guardian *

Ahren Warner’s first collection, Confer (Bloodaxe Books, 2011), was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation and was shortlisted for both the Forward Prize for Best First Collection and the Michael Murphy Memorial Prize 2013. He was awarded an Eric Gregory Award in 2010 and an Arts Foundation Fellowship in 2012. His second collection, Pretty (Bloodaxe Books, 2013), was another Poetry Book Society Recommendation, as is his third collection, Hello. Your promise has been extracted (2017), which was also shortlisted for the Roehampton Poetry Prize 2018. He is Poetry Editor of Poetry London and Vice Chancellor’s Research Fellow at Loughborough University, and currently lives in London.