Notes on Swimming, Arthur Lawson's debut pamphlet, draws the queer self into a sustained nautical idiom in which bodies dissolve into sand, sink like whales, or wake feathered as swans. Across these poems, domestic interiors become submarines and kettles boil into oceanic dioramas, the marine world functioning less as setting than as the available vocabulary for dissociation, suppression and grief. Lawson moves between intimate address and oblique third person, and between airy lyric fragments and denser prose-leaning pieces, holding family, sexual harm and mental fragility within a single, slowly drifting register. The result is a quietly disquieting collection, attentive to how readily a body might forget its own shape.
 
PRAISE for Notes on Swimming:
Arthur Lawson is wise beyond his years. Notes on Swimming is a beautifully cohesive collection of poems that deal with big themes - loss, grief, transformation, the nautical world, time - with an admirable deftness of touch. At turns moving and profound, these extraordinary and mysterious poems prove that Arthur Lawson is a poet to have on your radar, one to look out for.
— Jackie Kay
 
Notes on Swimming is admirably vulnerable, shifting in and out of dreamscapes to uncover buried grief. I adore the pantheon of marine life we're introduced to. This collection is as heart-breaking and as nourishing as a whale fall.
— C.H. Lieberman
 
ABOUT Arthur Lawson:
Arthur Lawson is a Bristol-based queer poet, studying Psychology at the University of Bristol. His poetry explores themes of sexuality and identity through the nautical world. He has been published in Acumen, twice as a Commended Foyle Young Poet, and on the London Underground.