Released July 31st 2021 // 46 pages
 
Kat Payne Ware’s THE LIVE ALBUM is a prime slab of poetry about pigs. The first side focuses on pork products, featuring ravishing cuts such as ‘BACON’, ‘BELLY’ and ‘LOIN’. In the second side Payne Ware’s poems grapple with the automation and mechanical production of the meat industry, highlighting its impersonality through playful use of form and intense language. THE LIVE ALBUM is an auspicious debut, one to sink your teeth into.
 
Kat Payne Ware (she/her) is a queer poet and essayist, and the founding editor of SPOONFEED, an online literary food magazine. Her debut pamphlet of poetry, THE LIVE ALBUM, was published with Broken Sleep Books in July 2021. You can find her on Twitter @katpayneware and @SPOONFEEDmag.
‘The animals in THE LIVE ALBUM may be slaughtered, but they are not dead. Always confronting and often striking in their subtle tragicomedy, Kat Payne Ware’s poems find astonishing voice in these cuts of meat that in turn cut away at our conventions of consumption. This is a rare and powerful poetics of nonhuman intimacy.’
   - Isabel Galleymore

‘In THE LIVE ALBUM Kat Payne Ware attains an intensity of observation and analysis that marks out the best poetry. Meticulously crafted images and porcine voices take us from the plate back to the slaughterhouse. In one sense it’s a book about displacement, and one that forces us to look clearly at something we’d rather keep hidden, with a formal innovation that matches the horrifying technologies explored. But instead of a polemic we encounter something lyrical, soulful and frequently moving. A shockingly good collection and an infinitely promising debut.’
   - Luke Kennard

‘The literature of meat has too long been confined to realist novels and recipe books. Kat Payne Ware’s THE LIVE ALBUM changes all that, with laser-sharp lyrics in an acrobatic array of forms that put the whole pig-eating industry on display. By turns fascinating and chilling, the acute playfulness of this poetry is a function of its empathy: a deep-dive documentary into carnivorous modernity that subjects the inhuman to unexpected enjambments, metaphors and emotions, ‘running arrhyhmic desire lines through the hearty text of me.’
   - Jeremy Noel-Tod