In reaper in a headlock, Simon Alderwick writes poems that move like breath, sometimes prayer, sometimes punch, always human. These are pieces rooted in the everyday, a fridge note, a kids’ kite in a storm, a late night drink, a hospital room, yet they keep opening onto stranger, wider weather. Across sequences of fatherhood, belief, boredom, addiction, grief, and the uneasy modern noise of ‘culture’, Alderwick’s lines slip between tenderness and bite. A poem can be a love story written on post it notes, a boxing gym lit by cuss words and velcro, a fable made of coinage and stained glass, or a river that carries the dead and the living in the same current. By turns surreal, funny, and devastating, reaper in a headlock is a book about trying to outlast the inevitable, and learning, again and again, what it means to stay in the room.
 
PRAISE for reaper in a headlock:
reaper in a headlock is funny, clever, and quietly profound — both a ringside view and an up-close meditation on life’s absurdities, where the mundane meets the mystical. Simon Alderwick observes the world with a sharp humour and measured insight.
— Romalyn Ante
 
In reaper in a headlock, Simon Alderwick drags the mythic, the mundane, and the morbid into the same dimly lit room and makes them talk. These poems move like fables told through cracked windows: clown-faced neighbours, vanishing men slipping past haunted borders, hermits with supernatural ears, underworld kings with hay-fever, zealots on the brink, and the slow collapse of houses overtaken by vines and regret. Alderwick’s world is both surreal and intimately familiar. His lines stalk the edges of civilization and return carrying a strange, electric wisdom. These poems confront the absurdity of culture, the brittleness of faith, and the quiet horrors that bloom in
ordinary lives.
— Bobby Parker
 
‘I made a first draft of my life story. / now i’m going at it with a red pen.’ reaper in a headlock is the bold, inventive, new collection from Simon Alderwick reflecting on the search for meaningfulness and the place of the artist in a chaotic universe. Time slows and accelerates, freezes and fills up space, forging surreal and striking images through idiomatic wordplay and conscious narrative. Brimming with metapoetry on the art of creation, the course of individual history, and the restlessness of the natural world, these poems flow and crash with a wisdom and sharp appreciation for language, rooted in Alderwick’s distinctive, stoic voice.
— Paul Whelan
 
ABOUT simon alderwick:
simon alderwick grew up in Kingston and now lives in Oxford. He is the author of ways to say we’re not alone (Broken Sleep Books, 2024).