Reeling in the face of collapsing systems, of politics, identity, and the banalities and distortions of modern living, Nick Laird confronts age-old anxieties, questions of aloneness, friendship, the push and pull of daily life. These poems transport us from a clifftop in Ireland's County Cork to a bench in New York's Washington Square, from a face-off between Freud and Michelangelo's Moses to one between the poet and a squirrel in a London garden.

At the book's heart lies the Forward Prize-winning title sequence, a profound meditation on a father's dying at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic. The reverberations of this knockout poem echo through the volume in its interrogations of inheritance and legacy, illness and justice, accounts of what is lost and what, if anything, can be retained. Amid rage, grief, and the conflagration of reality, Laird finds tenderness in the moments of connection that grow between the cracks and offers glimpses into the unadulterated world of childhood, where everything is still at stake and infinite.

Astonishing in its emotional range and intellect, Up Late is a powerful volume from an exceptionally gifted poet (Paul Muldoon, Times Literary Supplement).

Danny Williams didn't mean to be a lawyer, but somehow he is -- and for up to eighteen hours a day. He's well paid, home owning, and twenty-seven but is also overworked, lonely, and frequently stoned. The plan was to leave the troubles of a small town in Northern Ireland for the big city in England, but one evening an old school friend, Geordie, bursts into Danny's shiny new life. On the run from a Loyalist militia, Geordie brings everything Danny thought he had left behind and dumps it on his doorstep.

With infectious wit and energy to burn, Utterly Monkey is a searing, fiercely funny, and ultimately redemptive novel about surviving an office job, outwitting the bad guys, and, hopefully, getting the girl.

Reeling in the face of collapsing systems, of politics, identity, and the banalities and distortions of modern living, Nick Laird confronts age-old anxieties, questions of aloneness, friendship, the push and pull of daily life. These poems transport us from a clifftop in Ireland's County Cork to a bench in New York's Washington Square, from a face-off between Freud and Michelangelo's Moses to one between the poet and a squirrel in a London garden.

At the book's heart lies the Forward Prize-winning title sequence, a profound meditation on a father's dying at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic. The reverberations of this knockout poem echo through the volume in its interrogations of inheritance and legacy, illness and justice, accounts of what is lost and what, if anything, can be retained. Amid rage, grief, and the conflagration of reality, Laird finds tenderness in the moments of connection that grow between the cracks and offers glimpses into the unadulterated world of childhood, where everything is still at stake and infinite.

Astonishing in its emotional range and intellect, Up Late is a powerful volume from an exceptionally gifted poet (Paul Muldoon, Times Literary Supplement).

Nick Laird takes two experiences poles apart and unites them in gorgeous language...[with] fierce tenderness. -Dave Eggers, author of Heroes of the Frontier

Alison Donnelly has suffered for love. Still stuck in the small Northern Irish town where she was born, working for her father's real estate agency, she hopes a second marriage will help her get her life back together. Her sister Liz, a fiercely independent professor who lives in New York City, is about to return to Ulster for Alison's wedding, before heading to an island off the coast of Papua New Guinea to make a TV show about the world's newest religion.

Both sisters hope to write their own futures, but the past has other ideas. Alison wakes up the day after her wedding to find that her new husband has a past neither of them can escape. While Liz, in a rainforest on the other side of the planet, finds herself increasingly entangled in the eerie, charged world of Belef, the charismatic middle-aged woman she has come to film, the leader of a cargo cult.

As Modern Gods ingeniously interweaves the stories of Liz and Alison, it becomes clear that both sisters must learn how to negotiate with the past, with the sins of fanaticism, and decide exactly what the living owe to the dead. Laird's brave, innovative novel charts the intimacies and disappointments of a family trying to hold itself together, and the repercussions of history and belief.

Feel Free, the fourth collection from acclaimed poet Nick Laird, effortlessly marries the acoustic expansiveness of Whitman or Ashbery with the lyricism of Laird's forebears Heaney, MacNeice, and Yeats. With characteristic variety, invention, and wit, Laird explores the patterns of freedom and constraint--the family, the impress of history, the body itself--and how we might transcend them. Always daring, always renewing, Feel Free is Laird's most remarkable work to date.

From Go Giants:

Go in peace to love and serve the.
Go and get help. Go directly to jail.
Go down in flames. Go up in smoke.
Go for broke. Go tell Aunt Rhody.
Go tell the Spartans. Go to hell.
Go into detail. Go for the throat.

Look out for Nick Laird's new novel, Modern Gods, coming in June 2017

With his debut novel, Utterly Monkey, Nick Laird won acclaim on both sides of the Atlantic for his deft humor and sharp-eyed powers of observation. In this new novel, disaffected thirty-something college teacher David introduces his former teacher, American artist Ruth Marks, to his friend and flatmate James Glover, unwittingly setting in place a love triangle loaded with tension, guilt, and heartbreak. Set in the London art scene awash with new money and intellectual pretension, Nick Laird's insightful and drolly satirical novel explores the nature of contemporary romance among damaged souls whose hearts and heads never quite line up long enough for them to achieve true happiness.