Released 31st January 2022 // 54 pages // 978-1-915079-03-9
 
Cai Draper’s SPRUNG is an energetic and invigorating joyride through a few months in lockdown, ‘a tortoise wrapped in blank verse’ where Draper boldly admits ‘I want to take MDMA with my mum / & listen to Everything But the Girl ’. As fresh as a change of shirt, as bright as a newly polished button, this is poetry completely committed to Frank O’Hara’s command to ‘go on its nerve’. SPRUNG is an admirably animated pamphlet from an exciting young poet.
 
PRAISE for SPRUNG:
Cai Draper’s SPRUNG reads like a series of missives from the particular emergencies of the present pierced constantly and set to race or slow by the dull and dazzling lights and geographies of the past.
— Mira Mattar, The Bow
 
These poems kept me going through the weird first month of lockdown in 2020, and have yielded something new on each rereading since. Their surgical line breaks reel the reader in, making them stop and go at will, through poems where the mundane everyday makes room for moments of connection. Lines that touch on ‘what isn’t fully in poetry’ stretch themselves to host a multitude, and offer hope that, even if this is ‘the closest the world has ever seemed to closing down’, poems (whether dipped in chocolate sauce or not) are strong and flexible enough to hold it open.
— Ellen Dillon, Morsel May Sleep