Danny Hayward’s People is a ruthless criticism of existing social relations and a dissection of the subjects who live them. It is a compendium of poems, essays, and drama, opening with a hallucinatory foreword by the author: ‘It was at the street demonstration I think that I first noticed the pipe in my throat. It was a sunny day in Kwai Chung, the security staff were feasting at the Tree of Knowledge, Nuriel was saying something merely impossible.’

Hayward’s throat inflates and constricts beyond impossibility in the hundred-page dramatic poem, ‘The Consumption of Extremes: A Family Drama’; in the conceptual polemic on the production of value, ‘A Mediocre Galore’; in the lyric sequence, ‘PMS PBLC ND PRSNL’; and in the Byronic atrocity, ‘Don Discontinuity’. The three essays ‘The Comedy of Domination’, ‘Transitional Poetry’, and ‘By Impossibly Popular Demand’ address diverse subjects including Brecht, Catherine Wagner, Trotsky, William Bowles, and G. K. Chesterton.

176 pages, Paperback, a little smaller than A4

Published January 1, 2013, Mountain Press