A PBS Recommendation, Summer 2023
Praise for the book
"Effervescent with verbal velocity, buzzing with innuendo and insight, often pithy, sometimes poignant, Patterflash is a lovesong to language. Adam Lowe switches brilliantly between registers, from Polari to Yorkshire vernacular to everything in between. The effect is thrilling. This unique debut demands a standing ovation. I loved it!" Patience Agbabi
"A collection of ecstatic queer hymns that walk us through Leeds, through Manchester, with the unique language of being young and queer in the north" Andrew McMillan
About the book
Patterflash embraces the performative, self-ironising aesthetic of campness but, as a mask, it is a complex and very malleable one, capable of showing features of tenderness, bravery, righteous anger and sometimes sadness and alarm – as well as the comedic. Within a collection that displays an engaging variety of language registers, both ‘high’ and ‘low’ in tone, the masking sometimes makes use of Polari, the gay street language that simultaneously reveals and conceals, excludes and invites, estranges and makes familiar. The collection connects the poet as a wry, humane observer of the scene, particularly as conducted in Manchester, and the persona of “Adam Lowe” as both actor in and narrator of his own dramas, who performs, exults and sometimes suffers in a wide range of guises and disguises. What unites them is the urge to embrace the possibilities of being exactly who you want to be whatever the complications or consequences of your choice. From the four-year-old boy who, though always easy in his mixedness of race, also wants to wear a blonde woman’s wig without any angst of self-contradiction, through the poems delighting in the frank physicality of gay sex, to the mature man experiencing domestic contentment, Adam Lowe takes us on a journey rich in observation and always in a poetry that makes an art of patterflash.
Photography and front cover design by Lee Baxter baxterphoto.co.uk
Author events
Adam will be at the agents and editors panel, and Polari Literary Salon, as part of Huddersfield Literature Festival on 25 March 2023.
You can also catch Adam in Trinidad at this year's NGC Bocas Lit Fest.
Watch this space for Adam's Patterflash book tour from summer onwards.
