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Adam Crothers @severaldeer.bsky.social · 24/05/2026

An arrow-shower on a doorpost somewhere, expecting rain.

Adam Crothers @severaldeer.bsky.social · 29/04/2026

Cat fans! Swifties! Sonneteers! You can still book a place for the online launch (8pm UK time) of the latest batch from @brokensleepbooks.bsky.social, incl. my pamphlet. The cats will almost certainly make an appearance; poetry, or something better, in motion. www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/broken-sle...

Marlowe, a blue British shorthair, being a floor cat.

Harriet, a lilac tabby British shorthair, being a desk cat.

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Reposted by Adam Crothers

Adam Crothers @severaldeer.bsky.social · 29/04/2026

Three years ago today, two of the best things ever to happen to me (wrote the husband & father diplomatically) came to stay. Tonight I launch the book I wrote about them (+ home, guitars, paintings & Taylor Swift). Ready for it, @brokensleepbooks.bsky.social? www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/broken-sle...

Two British shorthair kittens, one blue (dark grey) and characteristically blurry and one a lilac (light pinkish-yellowish grey) tabby, lie on some underbed storage under a bed in their new home on 29 April 2023, and look towards the viewer as much as their developing facial muscles will permit. They are wonderful.

The cover of the excellent and affordable poetry pamphlet Home to My Cats.

A poster, largely blue and yellow, for the Broken Sleep Books April 2026 launch, naming as participants some guy named Adam Crothers along with Adam Piette, Casey Garfield, Anna Jordan, Simon Alderwick, Henry St Leger and Keith Caddy. The design references the iconic cover of Home to My Cats, a book by the Adam who is not Piette.

A still from Taylor Swift’s video for ‘… Ready for It?’: ‘READY FOR IT’ in yellow graffiti on a wall.

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Adam Crothers @severaldeer.bsky.social · 29/04/2026

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Adam Crothers @severaldeer.bsky.social · 29/04/2026

HOME TO MY CATS SLEEVE NOTES #30: ‘P.S. (PAWSCRIPT)’ Hidden track 3/3. On being fussy & cautious yet compelled to explore and expand your scanty plot; on taking your worming tablets. Cf. ‘All Too Well’, ‘Digging’ & ‘Nuns fret not…’ Lay out your unrest in the refrigerator light. Here endeth.

(The day the kittens gelled into cats,
I bought them gelato adapted for pets,

Two British shorthairs, one blue (dark grey) and one lilac (light grey), relax on a wooden kitchen floor on their first birthday, the day on which they ceased to be kittens and started being cats.

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Adam Crothers @severaldeer.bsky.social · 28/04/2026

HOME TO MY CATS SLEEVE NOTES #29: ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS In which an awful lot of people for just one monomaniacal pamphlet are thanked, the sadnesses and joys of life beyond the cats make themselves known, & it’s insisted again that the poems’ anti-avian violence is just the kittens dreaming in verse.

Two British shorthair kittens, one lilac (light grey) and the other blue (dark grey), stand on a grey-carpeted landing and are perfect.

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Adam Crothers @severaldeer.bsky.social · 27/04/2026

HOME TO MY CATS SLEEVE NOTES #28: ‘THE END’ The second hidden track; I had to tell the publisher it was a poem twice before they included it, so it might not be, but my smart friend who catsits got it straight away, so maybe all’s fine. Cf. Vonnegut. The end of an error. Skip town like an outlaw.

Not an asterisk. From Vonnegut’s Breakfast of Champions.

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Adam Crothers @severaldeer.bsky.social · 27/04/2026

This insufficiently human-wary fox was wandering around on my lunch break, and I don’t really like poetry very much but it was nice to have, no, not that one, Armitage’s ‘Birthday’ to revisit. www.pnreview.co.uk/archive/two-...

A lovely fox on a gravel path by some greenery; a bench’s arm rest runs along the bottom edge of the photograph.

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Adam Crothers @severaldeer.bsky.social · 26/04/2026

HOME TO MY CATS SLEEVE NOTES #27: ‘PANGUR BÁN (ADAM’S VERSION)’ One of my favourite things I’ve written & I didn’t write it. My first published translation, if that’s what it is, which it isn’t; apols to Anon anyway. Cf. ‘Shake It Off’, ‘Blank Space’ & Heaney’s ‘Widgeon’. Messe ocus Pangur Bán…

My kittens, not nearly as white as I’m,
make similar uses to me of time.
They dream of downing moth or widgeon; I
seek to impale what’s purely imaginary.

An image from Wikipedia of the manuscript wherein ‘Pangur Bán’ survives.

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Adam Crothers @severaldeer.bsky.social · 25/04/2026

HOME TO MY CATS SLEEVE NOTES #26: ‘GUILT’ Pro Bukowski’s being a jerk; anti the tragedy poem. Intercut rhyming syllabic sonnets trying to sound like CB’s free verse. Cf. ‘Forever & Always’ & Sonnet 18. Featuring my moulting ego A.A. Crumbthings, who appears in The Culture of My Stuff. Further poo.

Charles Bukowski’s On Cats on a cat. The first is a green paperback bearing an image of a black cat; the second is a lilac British shorthair kitten who goes by Harriet.

as they watch / eclipse-eyed / rooks / me stoop above their litter
meditative / recycled plastic scoop / a grandmaster

I doubt

the cats feel guilt / not one grain / about their pleasure / scarcely
buried in the mix of them / and well / why the hell should they

In a black and white photo, Charles Bukowski sits looking at papers on an armchair; a lovely cat perches behind him, looking to the left of the frame, perhaps at some poet who’s less of a jerk and a less interesting writer.

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Adam Crothers @severaldeer.bsky.social · 24/04/2026

HOME TO MY CATS SLEEVE NOTES #25: ‘DUMPS AND CLUMPS #2: ARSE POOETICA’ I wrote this waiting for a bus near Windermere & you can really feel the Wordsworth from the title on down. Cf. ‘The Lakes’, yep. One of my first poems for the cats; fizzles out alone, & thus insisted upon the rest of the book.

Detail from Helen Chamberlin’s 1937 illustration for a truncated version of Wordsworth’s ‘The Kitten and Falling Leaves’. A kitten wearing a ludicrous red bow stands plumply on hind legs atop a wall, and paws at some leaves that will presumably fall.

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Adam Crothers @severaldeer.bsky.social · 23/04/2026

HOME TO MY CATS SLEEVE NOTES #24: ‘PARTY LIKE IT’S 1989 (TM)’ The question of owning a cat or a good line. A prose poem on prose poems. Cf. ‘The Archer’. The bash in Muldoon’s ‘A Hummingbird’. ‘Guts in their guts’ no conscious Rodrigo nod, but the Prince is indeed more an Olivia boy than a Swiftie.

The Prince of Shadows and the Lady of Sharpness occupy the room as giddying gas, easy as unease. Above not being underfoot, they rumble like excavations, tick like minesweepers. They’re phoning it in, ‘it’ being an airstrike: they’ve positioned, some allege, archers

Olivia Rodrigo performing while wearing, most relevantly, a tank top that bears the image of a three-headed cat.

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Adam Crothers @severaldeer.bsky.social · 23/04/2026

I don’t know if @brokensleepbooks.bsky.social did this on purpose but I’m glad they did it.

Boris Vian’s Blues for a Black Cat next to my Home to My Cats: both are blue and yellow, and black-catted, and while there’s no white on my front cover there’s white text on the back.

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Adam Crothers @severaldeer.bsky.social · 22/04/2026

HOME TO MY CATS SLEEVE NOTES #23: ‘SHORTHAIR BLUES’ Lightnin’ Hopkins. Boris Vian. Laura Nyro. Raymonds Chandler & Carver. A blues that doesn’t quite work metrically on the page, implying a performance elsewhere. Cancer & heart attacks & alcoholism, & the cat as guardian or wish. Cf. ‘Anti-Hero’.

Lightnin’ Hopkins
don’t want no woman
whose hair ain’t no
longer’n
his.
Lightnin’ Hopkins
died on that hill
whose hair
was short
as his. Yeah:
you die on
a hill
with lightnin’ hoppin’
all up and down in yer
biz.

The 78 of ‘Short Haired Woman’ by Lightnin’ Hopkins.

The cover of Blues for a Black Cat and Other Stories by Boris Vian. Against a blue background, a moustachioed black cat smiles at the viewer; one yellow eye gleams through a monocle.

Laura Nyro, all black hair and cigarette, sits at a piano in apparent despair.

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Adam Crothers @severaldeer.bsky.social · 21/04/2026

HOME TO MY CATS SLEEVE NOTES #22: ‘LOUIS WAIN: THE FIRE OF THE MIND AGITATES THE ATMOSPHERE’ A silly, contrived form grinding itself & the title into glitter; I’m usually this way. Cf. ‘Fearless’. Thinking too often about the bit in the LW biopic where the hospital won’t let him have a cat.

Two anthropomorphic cats, drawn in black on white, stand upright on their hind legs, and give it some attitude against a pale orange-pink background of swirling brushstrokes.

The fire of the mind.
The found-in-the-mire.
The more than the few.
The atmosphere.

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Adam Crothers @severaldeer.bsky.social · 20/04/2026

HOME TO MY CATS SLEEVE NOTES #21: ‘DUMPS AND CLUMPS’ After Don Paterson’s lovely ‘Why Do You Stay Up So Late?’ Cf. ‘How You Get the Girl’. Plays with scatological irreverence (rockpoo-l) but no: the unspoken litter-tray deal is a tender thing. They used to read the scooping closely. Crap crit.

A heap of grey, granular cat litter against a white background.

I’ll answer, cats, although you haven’t asked it,
the question of what you often find me tasked with.

[Don Paterson:]
I’ll tell you, if you really want to know:
remember that day you lost two years ago

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Adam Crothers @severaldeer.bsky.social · 20/04/2026

HOME TO MY CATS SLEEVE NOTES #20: ‘MONET’S CAT’ Not a Monet painting: some Japanese pottery he owned. A poem, I hope, that describes by example, as must they all. The word ‘sugared’ arrived in the edit & is only an accidental reference to Swift’s ‘Sugar’. Oh, there’s a reason.

A sleeping cat modelled in white Japanese pottery.

the fur is first not
there and then it is

tactile as breath on
the porcelain head

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Adam Crothers @severaldeer.bsky.social · 18/04/2026

HOME TO MY CATS SLEEVE NOTES #19: ‘TAKASHI MURAKAMI: JAPAN SUPERNATURAL [etc]’ Long title. Adam’s keep-your-villanelle-interesting hack: whole thing one sentence. Apocalypse & priorities. Features my local under an assumed name. Cf. ‘Timeless’, maybe. It’s the dark end of the street as we know it.

Detail from Murakami’s ‘Japan Supernatural: Vertiginous After Staring at the Empty World Too Intensely, I Found Myself Trapped in the Realm of Lurking Ghosts and Monsters’: an enormous superflat cat with multicoloured irises is surrounded by all manner of zany figures.

I put Marlowe out of the room while Harriet prowls back in,
and next-door-but-one a catastrophic failure in experimental biotech
– the walls between realms having been rendered unusually thin

Behind a bar in an excellent pub: many bottles of gin and suchlike, a sign reading ‘BE NICE OR GET OUT’, and, prowling among those bottles, a copy of Home to My Cats.

I bought myself a drink at this bar the day I heard Broken Sleep had accepted the pamphlet.

A beer-tap sign for the Duration brewery’s Lucky pale ale, featuring a Japanese lucky-cat figure. Taken in March 2025 the day the pamphlet was formally accepted.

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Adam Crothers @severaldeer.bsky.social · 17/04/2026

HOME TO MY CATS SLEEVE NOTES #18: ‘ELDRITCH CATS’ Previously published in the D&D anthology Ragged Band of Travellers. Cf. ‘This Is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things’, ‘Dark Eyes’, the Eldritch Blast spell, Zelazny’s Lonesome October & loads more. Not a characteristic poem; but me at my most me.

A cat has a pact
with a stranger, an
elder: the Queen in
Yellow, the King
in Fog, the patron
whose fingers snap
fiercer than dog,

The cover of Ragged Band of Travellers: Writing from the Threshold of Dungeons & Dragons, an anthology edited by Jon Stone and published by Calque Press. Against a rust-red background, a brass-yellow dungeon map of triangular segments doubles as a fold-your-own-D20 template.

From the D&D Beyond website: a gnome (?) warlock in a cool-to-a-certain-value-of-cool outfit gazes in triumph and/or wonder at a glowing blue-and-purple sphere they have, quite possibly, summoned. I don’t know this person and am trying not to make assumptions.

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Adam Crothers @severaldeer.bsky.social · 16/04/2026

HOME TO MY CATS SLEEVE NOTES #17: ‘LEONARD COHEN MEETS TAYLOR SWIFT’ TS’s knack for playing syntax against the music; LC’s for precisely resisting the autocomplete slogan. Still, they don’t have my cats. Probably an LDR poem, in retrospect; Muldoon too. I’ve always liked it slow on the beach.

Leonard Cohen in black tie stands next to Taylor Swift in lilac, and they both look to camera. In ‘Betty’, TS really should have sung about the dark, not the far, side of the gym, but I like to think it was a ‘Memories’ reference anyway.

Leonard Cohen Meets Taylor Swift

I probe the latest tectonic shift
and wait for word. The word is slow.
The absent mare sends back her gift,
a spoonful of spoor more whitened than snow.

The beach is bleached to frozen drift.
Money hunts flesh over thawing shelf.
Leonard Cohen meets Taylor Swift:
just something the cats hear me call myself.

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Adam Crothers @severaldeer.bsky.social · 15/04/2026

HOME TO MY CATS SLEEVE NOTES #16: ‘HENRIËTTE RONNER-KNIP: THE MUSICIANS’ Wherein I assay cuteness. A poet friend on this single-subject pamphlet: ‘It’s like a game of who-blinks-first.’ Cf. ‘Teardrops on My Guitar’ but sadly not ‘On Lute-strings Cat-eaten’ (one for the sequel – ha! – perhaps).

A Dutch painting wherein a mother cat nuzzles one kitten while the other three mess with an guitar: two, sitting on a slithered collection of sheet music, play with broken strings, while the last pokes a head and a paw out of the sound hole. It’s all adorable.

Wherein the instrument’s so tired
it can but squeeze another teard-

rop kitten from its strung-
out eye, which is staring

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Adam Crothers @severaldeer.bsky.social · 14/04/2026

HOME TO MY CATS SLEEVE NOTES #15: ‘ARTHUR RACKHAM: BY DAY SHE MADE HERSELF INTO A CAT’ The cats make themselves into all sorts throughout. Their metaphor is metaphor. Verse as ‘a system of punctuation’ (TSE). Cf. ‘Come in with the Rain’. I think this was once meant to sound like Emily Brontë.

In Arthur Rackham’s magnificent illustration, a yellow-eyed black cat, lower teeth exposed, flowers from a bough; clouds scrape the sky, and red-lit turrets smoulder in the distance.

every cloud is
one piece of silver

do not add them they
will not give pleasing

answers at points a
cat is a plume of

tarnish you cannot
sum its rebuttals

Harriet, a lilac tabby British shorthair, looks unimpressed and impressive on a roof beam.

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Adam Crothers @severaldeer.bsky.social · 13/04/2026

HOME TO MY CATS SLEEVE NOTES #14: ‘TAYLOR SWIFT MEETS LEONARD COHEN, 17 JUNE 2010’ One of my favourite pictures. Judy Collins as well! Cf. ‘Chelsea Hotel No. 2’ & ‘Dress’. Was LC thinking of this day when writing ‘Kanye West Is Not Picasso’? The cats, in truth, are indoor cats; robins, at ease.

Leonard Cohen, in black tie, tips his hat to Taylor Swift (who wears a lilac dress) while shaking her hand; Judy Collins, in white, looks on. Judy Collins isn’t in this poem, but her version of ‘Send in the Clowns’ plays at the beginning and the end of my first book and I’m sure I’ll come back to her someday.

The cats track a foreign robin that’s infiltrated
their zone, their software slowing it from arterial flicker
to series of stoplight stills. It’s a flipbook, a dart
flown in increments to the chamber’s heart, and so vulgar

the cats still haven’t found the words. They watch the robin

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Adam Crothers @severaldeer.bsky.social · 12/04/2026

HOME TO MY CATS SLEEVE NOTES #13: ‘FRANZ MARC: TWO CATS, BLUE AND YELLOW’ Zwei Katzen, blau und gelb, think Marilyn Chin’s ‘Blues on Yellow’, & all art, should aspire to the condition of being about them. The garden in the poem is the garden in the painting but also the garden in ‘Betty’. Stop.

In Franz Marc’s painting, a couple of Expressionist cats, blue and yellow, express themselves, surrounded by Expressionist flowers and fruits in the garden of, in the background, a green-roofed white-walled Expressionist house.

The blue cat has blue blues;
blows those blue-cat-blue blues
and licks his absent balls.

A still from Taylor Swift’s lyric video for ‘Betty’: a quiet street, a sidewalk, a chainlink fence and autumn leaves, on all of which is superimposed the lyric ‘or lead me to the garden?’

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Adam Crothers @severaldeer.bsky.social · 11/04/2026

HOME TO MY CATS SLEEVE NOTES #12: ‘MARCUS CORNISH: KATHLEEN RAINE’ One of the pleasures of @girtoncollege.bsky.social, this poet-&-cat sculpture. The poem’s form: a sonnet variant I’ve found useful the last several years. Might try being more KR-influenced someday. The Raine came pouring down.

A sculpture of the poet Kathleen Raine, her hands on the very fine cat in her lap.

face of a cliff lifts
to an unreal scale

the incline the rift
kathleen and a cat

the poet the pet
the prayer the proof

Rollie McKenna’s 1951 photographic portrait of Kathleen Raine, who wears a coat or jacket and a possibly silk scarf. There’s no cat visible in the photo but that isn’t evidence of absence.

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Adam Crothers @severaldeer.bsky.social · 10/04/2026

HOME TO MY CATS SLEEVE NOTES #11: 'NEW OLD THEOLOGY' On bringing the kittens home after first boosters. Cf. TS's 'False God', LDR's 'Religion', the Stones' 'Shine a Light'. The vet: 'The best thing you can do when you have cats' (oh no, oh no, what have I missed) 'is to have two. Congratulations.'

The kittens’ not technically believing
in the efficacy of these vaccines

– flu, leukaemia, enteritis – has
the bearing of a foam sphere. Treats

for all, and the soft deities are
poured back into their carrier,

smoky libations. If all gods
are false then falseness should

be flagged as a given: no longer
a meaningful factor

in the whole kerfuffle.

A 7th-century BCE figure of Bastet as a cat-headed woman in a striped (tabby?) dress, taken from the Met website.

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Adam Crothers @severaldeer.bsky.social · 09/04/2026

HOME TO MY CATS SLEEVE NOTES #10: ‘HARRIET’ My princess of knives. Swift butts ‘Red’ against Tennyson. Named for a detective, but there’s poetry and spying too. When I tried to read her this poem, she wandered off. ‘While poets try to engineer definitions of love…’ (David Ford).

A ‘lilac’ (light, yellowish-pinkish grey) female British shorthair kitten perches on a windowsill, plotting the death of the ape behind the camera.

I’ll sing low,
sweet. The love
in you’s the red
in the tooth – the claw?
the tooth –
extracted from your
brother’s fur.
Thorn of milk and
eye of nettle;
barb of petal;
unicorn.
Your first-born
bloodthirst,

Harriet Walter as Harriet Vane wears a black hat, solving the murder of the ape behind the camera.

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Adam Crothers @severaldeer.bsky.social · 09/04/2026

This book, unlike me, is just about having kittens. www.brokensleepbooks.com/product-page... @brokensleepbooks.bsky.social

Three copies of the pamphlet Home to My Cats (the cover featuring a feline silhouette within a yellow pane in an otherwise blue and black grid) are invitingly fanned on a wooden desk. You want to buy so, so many of these.

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Adam Crothers @severaldeer.bsky.social · 08/04/2026

HOME TO MY CATS SLEEVE NOTES #9: 'MARLOWE' My special guy; my shadow. 'Blue like I've never known'. Named for a detective, but there's poetry and spying too. He sat and listened when I read him this poem. Why write free verse if you're not going to be a weird little enjambment freak about it?

A photograph wherein a ‘blue’ (dark grey) male British shorthair kitten, on a step carpeted in a more institutional grey, gives the camera an intense and serious look.

Clown-fox, crow,
chonk of canned meat,
bright star, what you
eat brings big
sleep-
y vibes
to the liminal
spaces, the landing
and steps where you’re
staring,
unsmiling bog
body, goblin,

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Adam Crothers @severaldeer.bsky.social · 07/04/2026

HOME TO MY CATS SLEEVE NOTES #8: ‘LOUISE BOURGEOIS: THE ANGRY CAT’ Ekphrasis: the image giving movement to the poem. Bourgeois a point of departure: no description required. Cf. ‘This Is Me Trying’ & Sonny Boy Williamson. I hope if Nicole Flattery ever reads this she’ll like being part of a rhyme.

Louise Bourgeois’s artwork The Angry Cat depicts a wonderfully cat looking at the viewer, its patterning resembling more than anything else the pebbles that rise in a baker’s Zen garden.

Louise Bourgeois: The Angry Cat

This cat is angry about resembling the pebbles that rise in a baker’s Zen garden.
That cat is angry that in each of its cells is a similarly angry prison warden.

This cat is acid snailing the shell of a nine-below-zero-volt battery.
That cat is alcohol percentages on a blackboard, and is the stories of Nicole Flattery.

This cat is aromantic except when aromatherapising with a rack of quite maculate shoes.
That cat is apolitical except when exposed to the merest hiss of PMQs.

This cat is ascended from the demideity that vents its entropic ennui via bagpipes.
That cat is ambiguous in a manner unaccounted for in the Seven Types.

This cat is acquisitive on the matter of the latest christophersmartphone.
That cat is astonishingly Irish for cat makes that cat’s Irish heart moan.

This cat is aspirational regarding the jargon-free prose of Arthur Quiller-Couch.
That cat is amused that a mouse in pure prospect is worth more than two amuse-bouches.

[The poem concludes in the next picture, and in the next alt text.]

This cat is already the size of an atom were an atom a nova-size kitten.
That cat is acting so much like this cat that this is me trying to split them.

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Adam Crothers @severaldeer.bsky.social · 06/04/2026

HOME TO MY CATS SLEEVE NOTES #7: ‘AUBADE #57’ Dawn, sonnets, guitars: first poem for the kittens, two weeks in, leaning on go-tos. Cf. Swift’s ‘Daylight’. ‘Charcoal rods’ blends charcoal sticks into graphite rods; sounds right. Jörmungandrrrrrrr. They’d snake in sync, one fuzzy waking heart rate.

Aubade #57

Stormfront and ceasefire, charcoal rods braced in tandem,
yoked world-serpents swallowing everything that
fits, those mythological ravens, Moodswing and Whim,
form themselves at first light into eddying cats.

Doodling dusty forecasts on a carpeted sunpatch,
they’re less than whelmed by the vox, the guitars. No fussy dirge
I fingerpick, no noodly pentatone, could itch its X upon the pitch
their breakfast requests attain. All needle, no syringe,

they’re song but they ain’t talk. They stalk the plush duck I
dangle, a sweet plum, a punchline. We imagine we’re killing it.
A stroke from their paw-stashed styluses draws the unlucky

ducky as maelstrom: doom sheathed in down. Flickknife as distaff.
When I pluck a blunted E string’s tarnished filament,
I feel lovely and cruel as the kitties I live with.

A loop of new acoustic-guitar strings against a white background, arguably resembling a sun, or a serpent circling the world, or the secret O of ‘aubade’.

Two enticing bundles of willow-charcoal sticks. You’d start a fire, enable a reaction, draw an unlucky ducky as maelstrom.

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Adam Crothers @severaldeer.bsky.social · 06/04/2026

HOME TO MY CATS SLEEVE NOTES #6: THE EPIGRAPH Jubilate Agno got there first. Far more important than Eliot to these poems (no shade on the Practical Cats). The cat as highly compressed cosmic-divine phenomenon. Two cats populated entirely by worlds; song as a probing thereinto. Paw Quartets.

For he can tread to all the measures upon the music. – Christopher Smart

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Adam Crothers @severaldeer.bsky.social · 05/04/2026

HOME TO MY CATS SLEEVE NOTES #5: ‘M.O. (MEOW)’ First poem, first hidden track (not on the contents page). Your standard Heaney/Little Willie John mashup. Must write about Peggy Lee’s unfortunate cat-themed work someday. Cf. ‘Gorgeous’, ‘The Archer’. Perimeter fences: border & trespass. Come in.

A poem excerpt: ‘The pen gets cat | scratch fever when I | hold it right.’

The sleeve for a Little Willie John EP, featuring the singer, in shirt and loosened tie, clicking his fingers and having a fine time. The EP includes the song ‘Leave My Kitten Alone’: my poem knocks together ‘Fever’ and Heaney’s ‘Digging’, not ‘Leave My Kitten Alone’ and Heaney’s ‘The Early Purges’, and that’ll have to be another poem sometime.

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Adam Crothers @severaldeer.bsky.social · 04/04/2026

HOME TO MY CATS SLEEVE NOTES #4: THE ENDORSEMENTS Kirsten Irving’s editorial eye is a laser made of eagles & fantastical swords. Any James Womack poem reminds me of my insufficiencies. A shame ‘meowlogisms’/‘feline overlords’ constantly appear on slim volumes: you don’t know what you’re getting.

Home to My Cats is deliciously strange and sincere, celebrating cats in all their tender/violent contradictions. Crothers commits to his subject without irony, like a cat stalking a toy with the ferocity needed to fell a rat. Unlike Eliot’s ranging jellicle ensemble, Crothers gives us just two cats to track, each of whom contains multitudes: Harriet and Marlowe trot between worlds, shapeshifting into spies, pets and little household gods, described by dancing, frisking language: words merge and warp, snuggling meowlogisms alongside nods to Christopher Smart’s Jubilate Agno, while rhymes blend, blur and contrast like pigments on a coat (the staccato of a Bengal’s spots, the repeated swipes of a tabby’s stripes). The reader stops and starts like a shrew below a lifted paw, waiting (and perhaps hoping) for it to clap back down.
— Kirsten Irving

This collection shows us once again that cats bring out the best in people. Not by being better than people – I'm fairly sure I won't be eaten by my children if I die unacknowledged at home one day – but by being open, in a way at once alien and domestic, to our thoughts and intentions. From Louis Wain to Louise Bourgeois via the litter box, Crothers responds to and reflects on cats – his own and other artists' – in ways that are new and always surprising. An anagram of Adam Crothers is 'arm cats' horde': this beautiful and sensitive set of poems may be setting us up for the forthcoming invasion. I for one welcome our new feline overlords.
— James Womack

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Adam Crothers @severaldeer.bsky.social · 03/04/2026

HOME TO MY CATS SLEEVE NOTES #3: THE BLURB They think you wrote a book you’d want to write (& read): relief! ‘Playful’, ‘mischief’, ‘riffing’, ‘punning’, ‘comedy’, ‘wit’: hope so, but just trying to make a poem happen, here. ‘Funny is the opposite of not funny’ (Chesterton). Nobody ‘lets’ TS & LC…

From the Broken Sleep website: ‘Home to My Cats by Adam Crothers is a fizzing, formally playful pamphlet that turns feline devotion into a poetics of art, music and mischief. These poems move between lyric address and ekphrasis, riffing on Louise Bourgeois, Franz Marc, Takashi Murakami, Louis Wain, and Arthur Rackham, while also letting Taylor Swift and Leonard Cohen wander into the cat’s-eye frame. Crothers writes with a quick, punning intelligence and a gift for the compressed song, where philosophy slides into litter-tray comedy, and tenderness is sharpened by wit. Beneath the surface-level glee sits a serious enquiry into attention, companionship and belief, as the cats become both muse and measure, their small tyrannies and private theologies remaking the home into a site of lyric necessity.’

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Adam Crothers @severaldeer.bsky.social · 02/04/2026

HOME TO MY CATS SLEEVE NOTES #2: THE COVER I get to have my name on a beautiful thing. What's form but a backlit animal meddling with a precise grid? Cf. Franz Marc, Two Cats, Blue and Yellow. Someday one of my book covers won't feature a right profile. I'm sure the cat would love a feather.

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Adam Crothers @severaldeer.bsky.social · 01/04/2026

HOME TO MY CATS SLEEVE NOTES #1: THE TITLE Cf. Taylor Swift, ‘Gorgeous’; & her red-carpet comment about not going home with men. Stumble home to your cats; gravitate towards them; provide them with housing. My 2nd title w/ animals; 2nd w/ ‘My’. As cosy and domestic a book as I’m likely to write.

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Adam Crothers @severaldeer.bsky.social · 01/04/2026

It’s publication month for Home to My Cats, which will launch online on Wednesday 29th before its official publication day of Thursday 30th! Some sleeve notes every day till then or till I regret it.

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Adam Crothers @severaldeer.bsky.social · 23/03/2026

www.brokensleepbooks.com/product-page...

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Reposted by Adam Crothers

Adam Crothers @severaldeer.bsky.social · 20/03/2026

Owing to my presumptions (or, if you will, purrsumptions) of popular (or, if you will, pawpular) demand, I’m doing some cat (or, if you will, cat) poems from the forthcoming (or, if you will, furthcoming) book at the Hughes Hall Literary Day (or, if you will, Hughes Hall Litter Tray) this evening.

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Adam Crothers @severaldeer.bsky.social · 20/03/2026

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Reposted by Adam Crothers

Broken Sleep Books @brokensleepbooks.bsky.social · 18/03/2026

Home to My Cats by Adam Crothers is a fizzing, formally playful pamphlet that turns feline devotion into a poetics of art, music and mischief. www.brokensleepbooks.com/product-page...

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Adam Crothers @severaldeer.bsky.social · 03/03/2026

*yawns* *stretches* I have a new book on the way! Home to My Cats, a chonky pamphlet of poems about (as the title might suggest) kittens and Taylor Swift, will be published by @brokensleepbooks.bsky.social in April 2026, and is available to preorder. www.brokensleepbooks.com/product-page...

brokensleepbooks.com

Adam Crothers - Home to My Cats | Broken Sleep Books

Home to My Cats by Adam Crothers is a fizzing, formally playful pamphlet that turns feline devotion into a poetics of art, music and mischief. These poems move between lyric address and ekphrasis, rif...

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Adam Crothers @severaldeer.bsky.social · 23/01/2025

Michael Longley's gone. This will never do.

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Adam Crothers @severaldeer.bsky.social · 01/12/2024

A week in, this appears functional. I’m seeing cats and jokes and poems, and also sentences.

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