Please Do Not Touch or Feed the Horses
My debut pamphlet, Please Do Not Touch or Feed the Horses, won the Poetry London Pamphlet Prize 2024 and an Eric Gregory Award 2025. You can buy it here.
About
In this poignant and adventurous pamphlet, Tom Bailey captures the joy of connection, the omnipresence of grief, and the quiet fortitude of those navigating both. Portents come in many forms: horses, leaves, paper boats, ‘a magpie rattl[ing] the rainstick of its throat’. But so does hope: in fancy dress parties, in ‘the / song the conch sings’, in the way ‘the river threads / its noisy voice through the needle of itself’. With dry wit and piercing clarity, Bailey interweaves humour and pathos to craft poems that linger in the mind and reveal a captivating new voice.
Praise for Please Do Not Touch or Feed the Horses
"Please Do Not Touch or Feed the Horses is a pamphlet I’ve been waiting for. It did not disappoint. Bailey makes the ordinary spectacular. The worlds he spins in his poems are full of dreamlike lines and thinking, startling images. He tilts the world to allow us to see it differently and evokes the baffling, beautiful experience of living, grieving, loving, existing." – Cecilia Knapp
"It's the startling clarity of language that welcomes you into these poems, and the warm wealth of insight that keeps you with them. Rarely does a book of poems arrive as such a pleasure; more rarely are the difficulties of life and death held with such care." – Harry Josephine Giles
"Poetry in Bailey’s hands becomes a magical space, an experiential technology that foregrounds play." – Tom Branfoot, Oxford Poetry
"Bailey’s is an original voice, in a debut pamphlet with no fillers. Quirky, wry, funny. There can’t be anything better to spend £5 on." – Vanessa Lampert, Poetry Society Sealey Challenge
Read this interview with Tom about the pamphlet on the Epoch blog.