Some Integrity

Shortlisted for the Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry 2023<br>Shortlisted for the John Pollard Foundation International Poetry Prize 2023<br>Shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection 2022<br>Winner of the Clarissa Luard Prize 2021<br>In 'Minty', one of the typically charged and capacious poems in this eagerly-awaited debut collection, a mojito glass reflects:<br>whatever grid of bricks &amp; wood makes up the room we<br>happen to be sitting in<br>is dilated &amp; wrapped around a single focal-point; whatever<br>portion of the sky that happens<br><br>to be visible through the window becomes a convex bowl. The<br>weather also happens,<br>as it always does, &amp; passes on, &amp; brings those other places<br>where it falls into the orbit of the glass.<br>'To look up from Padraig Regan's words is to find oneself gently re-fitted into the world,' writes Vahni Capideo, praising Padraig Regan's 'awesome originality and honesty'. The poems of<em>Some Integrity</em>bring something new to the Irish lyric tradition. Queerness is a way of looking, a perspective, grounded in an awareness of the porous and provisional nature of our bodies. The book's social encounters and exchanges, its responses to the work of artists, its figures in a landscape, and its considerations of food and desire, work as capsule narratives and as an exhilarating extension of that lyric tradition.