Books & Spoken Word
Tom Sastry Book Launch
Raise the Bar’s ‘Spotlight’ open mic is back for a one-off show to present the Bristol book launch of Tom Sastry’s much-anticipated poetry collection A Man’s House Catches Fire. With support from another popular Bristol poet, Stefan Mohamed
“What to do when everything goes up in flames? Summon up Tom Sastry’s poems, with all their elegant, satirical, and hurt-quenching power: here are nightmares and fairytales, museums full of regret, misenchantments and magic for dark times.”
Those wishing to participate in the open mic are asked to bring poems relating to the themes of the book: personal and political disasters and finding hope in hard times. The open mic will be in two halves with the second half reserved for “more uplifting poems”.
is needed now More than ever
Tom Sastry was chosen by Carol Ann Duffy as one of the 2016 Laureate’s Choice poets. His resulting pamphlet Complicity was a Poetry School Book of the Year and a Poetry Book Society pamphlet choice. He is the co-editor with Suzannah Evans of Everything That Can Happen, a poetry anthology about the future published by The Emma Press. This is his first full collection. An accomplished reader and performer, Tom has a growing reputation as a spoken word artist. In 2019, he was appointed as the first ever Resident Poet for LYRA (Bristol Poetry Festival).
Stefan is a Bristol-based spoken word performer and author. His poetry collection PANIC! is published by Burning Eye Books and his novels Falling Leaves and the Bitter Sixteen Trilogy are published by Salt Publishing.
A Bristol Poetry Festival Slam finalist, Stefan has performed poetry and ambiguously poetry-adjacent ancillary material at various events and festivals in Bristol and beyond. He was also once cut from a broadcast on Dialect Radio Bristol for being “unsuitable for a family audience”, and someone on YouTube told him that “none of what you have ‘rhymed’ in this video has an conceivable merit”.
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