Poetry Playback is a new reading series in which a poet is invited to read from an exemplary new work in its entirety, from start to finish, as a single, sustained performance.

At this event Fiona Benson will read from Vertico & Ghost. One of the most discussed poetry books of 2019, Fiona Benson’s Vertigo & Ghost is a dark and unsettling breakthrough collection, bringing together poems of the natural world, depression, the body, migration and child/parenthood. Encircling provocatively around its remarkable and shocking central sequence of ‘Zeus’ poems, it is a mind-bending retelling of Greek mythology that examines post-traumatic change and the physical effects of sexual violence on its victims.