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Released 30th, November, 2024 // 50 pages // 978-1-916938-59-5 // RRP: £9.99

 

Hand-me-down Haircut offers a powerful and poignant exploration of masculinity, identity, and the working-class experience. Raised by a single mother on a council estate in Bedford, Stevie Kilgour's poetry delves deeply into the raw challenges of navigating life amidst economic struggle, societal expectations, and the complex dance of manhood. His voice emerges from the grit of southern England, speaking for those often overlooked, and his verses weave a narrative of resilience, survival, and introspection. This collection is a tribute to the courage required to remain true to oneself in a world that often misunderstands working-class masculinity.

 

PRAISE for Hand-Me-Down Haircut:

An estate is like corn-starch in the body of a boy, that is to say, a boy is made of water and that water is soft and constantly moving. But an estate turns a boy into Ooblek that is to say when you apply pressure to a boy they turn solid they turn rigid. Stevie Kilgour proves this in this beautiful collection of poems in a way I wish I had done first.

   — Jake Wild Hall

 

Kilgour’s collection explores the messy entanglements of class, gender, and race as they shape all kinds of social and familial structures. Through brisk and vivid poems, Kilgour is sensitive to the way that masculinities are made – ‘I’m growing a new manhood’, one speaker says. By attending to the materialities of the body, food, British landscapes and more, this collection has much to tell us about forging an identity ever in flux.

   — Christopher Lloyd

 

This is a collection ablaze with the exploration of identity. An accent burns at the roof of its speaker’s mouth. Promises are boiled alive. Queerness, class, masculinity and nationality spill across its poems as a heady mist. But beneath its accounting of pain, Kilgour’s collection is one that at once practices the ‘expulsion of power’ and, through its navigation of fatherhood, the reclamation of it.

   — William Gee

 

ABOUT Stevie Kilgour:

Stevie Kilgour is a British–Irish poet from a council estate in Bedford. He gained his Doctorate in 2023 in Poetry, Masculinity and Working-class Studies. He believes in the power and importance of the working-class voice and its role in the creative industries. He didn’t gain an education until he was 30 years old. He now spends his time in his kitchen in Leeds, drinking coffee and listening to 90s Jungle, drum and bass and metal. He supports Luton Town.

Stevie Kilgour - Hand-me-down Haircut

£7.99Price

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