Coming Soon
Category: Coming Soon
Number of pages: 72
ISBN: 9781911752172
Publication date: October 12, 2026
Price: £12.99
Pre-order now – Publishing 12 October 2026
“Jonathan Edwards uses poetry as a time machine to celebrate the resilience, humour and dignity of working-class lives.” – Kim Moore
Rooted in the South Wales Valleys, Talk of the Town is Jonathan Edwards’ most ambitious collection yet. With wit and musicality, he balances tender glimpses into the lives of his working-class grandparents with surreal portraits – a family presented as a dance flashmob, or an Olympic bobsleigh team. Bridges, nightclubs and hospitals voice thoughts on their town. Pop-culture icons Kurt Cobain, Richey Edwards and Shakin’ Stevens stroll past, offering their glamour and greatness, their yearnings and tragedies. Accessible, moving and energised by the language of the streets, these poems are love letters to the places and times which made them, to the wonder of the everyday and the open-armed characters who step from these pages, offering their unforgettable lives.
Jonathan Edwards
Jonathan Edwards’ first collection of poems, My Family and Other Superheroes (Seren Books, 2014), received the Costa Poetry Award and the Wales Book of the Year People’s Choice Award, and was shortlisted for the Fenton Aldeburgh First Collection Prize. His second collection, Gen (Seren Books, 2018), also received the Wales Book of the Year People’s Choice Award, and his poem about Newport Bridge was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Single Poem 2019. He received the Troubadour Prize in 2022 and the Ledbury Poetry Festival Prize in 2025. Jonathan has been poet-in-residence at Gladstone’s Library and at the Dylan Thomas Boathouse, Laugharne, a judge for the National Poetry Competition, the Wales Book of the Year and the Foyle Young Poets Award, and a Literature Wales mentor of emerging writers. He lives in Crosskeys, South Wales, and is an Advisory Fellow for the Royal Literary Fund.
“Poignant yet humorous, Talk of the Town gives us a glimpse into mid-century working-class Wales, full of vibrant characters and luminous histories.”
Romalyn Ante
“Talk of the Town is alive from its first line: voices rise through it, warm, lucid, unmistakably human. Jonathan Edwards has the rare gift of becoming everyone and everything. He is not a poet who stands outside the world looking in. He belongs to it, utterly: to its people and birds, its streets and bridges, its griefs and celebrations. Nothing is described. Everything is inhabited. That is why these poems feel so convincing. They erase the boundary between subject and object, until people and places belong to the same community of feeling. A bridge carries not only traffic but despair. A town discovers its own voice. Each poem enlarges the circle of what it means to be alive. This is not a book you finish. It is one you return to again and again, because each reading reveals another life, another voice, another act of belonging.”
David Morley
