Please Do Not Touch or Feed the Horses

In this poignant and adventurous pamphlet, Tom Bailey captures the joy of connection, the omnipresence of grief, and the quiet fortitude of those navigating both. Portents come in many forms: horses, leaves, paper boats, ‘a magpie rattl[ing] the rainstick of its throat’. But so does hope: in fancy dress parties, in ‘the / song the conch sings’, in the way ‘the river threads / its noisy voice through the needle of itself’. With dry wit and piercing clarity, Bailey interweaves humour and pathos to craft poems that linger in the mind and reveal a captivating new voice.

Please Do Not Touch or Feed the Horses is a pamphlet I’ve been waiting for. It did not disappoint. Bailey makes the ordinary spectacular. The worlds he spins in his poems are full of dreamlike lines and thinking, startling images. He tilts the world to allow us to see it differently and evokes the baffling, beautiful experience of living, grieving, loving, existing. – Cecilia Knapp

Tom Bailey is a poet based in Edinburgh. He won the Poetry Society’s Hamish Canham Prize 2023, and his poems have been published in magazines including The Poetry Review, Poetry London, berlin lit, bath magg, Propel Magazine, Anthropocene, Under the Radar, The North, and elsewhere. He also edits the online poetry magazine And Other Poems.