Overview

Out for Air is the exhilarating first collection by former professional skateboarder Olly Todd. Infused with movement, surprise and play, Out for Air presents a unique vision of the built environment, celebrating places where 'the bridges are endless / beyond the cantilever / of reality'. Each poem is its own event: expansive in scope but intricate in form, a masterclass in precision engineering. Todd rewires T. S. Eliot's Waste Land in his strange, compelling descriptions of the modern city: melting asphalt; a U-turning taxi; a diner swallowed by a sinkhole. In this disorientating landscape the skateboarder-poet is genius loci, the spirit of the place. From Manhattan's 'silky streets' and the Pacific Coast Highway to inner-city London and his native Cumbria, together these poems record a life lived on the move, in motion, on the cusp of things. 'I'm dazzled by this wonderful debut. Todd writes with a tangible physicality, solid as a curb, so that the language itself crunches, glides, grinds. A radically different way of experiencing the built and natural environment and an endlessly engaging, witty, serious and astute new voice.' LUKE KENNARD

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9781913850074

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Reviews

'Olly Todd makes rare, richly idiomatic music from the rubble of the pop metropolis. Like the pro skateboarder whose world is here uniquely evoked, Todd approaches the built environment through drift and detour, finding hidden lines of desire and happenstance. These often balladic poems are gorgeously wrought and idiosyncratic, scored with the subterranean rhythms of Cumbria, California and London. The air of the book is at once as intimate as its city nightcaps and as expansive as its bay vistas. When I read Todd's poems I feel more a part of the world, the textured interaction of time and place, the 'afternoons julienned / Into cigarettes, cider trips', 'the circles we insist on travelling'. This is a tender, transformative, elemental book.' SAM BUCHAN-WATTS;'Out for Air is an inventive and alluring debut, in which the early evening sun lights up the soaring, exhilarating miles of skateable road and sky between the north of England and the USA. With shades of Kleinzahler and Eliot, these poems explore angles and movement, friendship and distance, in a voice that is genuinely original, graceful and often strange.'MARTHA SPRACKLAND; 'Olly Todd's wonderful Out for Air creates a world of familiarity gone strange, a world of signs of the human in motion, where the living in place becomes its constant study. It makes a hard to pin down language which is all its own, and which mirrors its subjects' international scope, its playful, sometimes arch, worldview, and which announces a wholly original voice.' WILL BURNS; 'It's really weird, as I am reading Olly's poems I am engaging with a part of my brain I forgot existed. It's kinda like when you try a mindfulness app and the narrator asks you to focus on or pay particular attention to eating, say, a nut or a raisin. Through his words a whole world and potential opens up, a distillation of experience that feels universal and intimate.' NICK JENSEN; 'I'm dazzled by this wonderful debut. Todd writes with a tangible physicality, solid as a curb, so that the language itself crunches, glides, grinds. A radically different way of experiencing the built and natural environment and an endlessly engaging, witty, serious and astute new voice.' LUKE KENNARD

'Olly Todd makes rare, richly idiomatic music from the rubble of the pop metropolis. Like the pro skateboarder whose world is here uniquely evoked, Todd approaches the built environment through drift and detour, finding hidden lines of desire and happenstance. These often balladic poems are gorgeously wrought and idiosyncratic, scored with the subterranean rhythms of Cumbria, California and London. The air of the book is at once as intimate as its city nightcaps and as expansive as its bay vistas. When I read Todd's poems I feel more a part of the world, the textured interaction of time and place, the 'afternoons julienned / Into cigarettes, cider trips', 'the circles we insist on travelling'. This is a tender, transformative, elemental book.' SAM BUCHAN-WATTS;'Out for Air is an inventive and alluring debut, in which the early evening sun lights up the soaring, exhilarating miles of skateable road and sky between the north of England and the USA. With shades of Kleinzahler and Eliot, these poems explore angles and movement, friendship and distance, in a voice that is genuinely original, graceful and often strange.'MARTHA SPRACKLAND; 'Olly Todd's wonderful Out for Air creates a world of familiarity gone strange, a world of signs of the human in motion, where the living in place becomes its constant study. It makes a hard to pin down language which is all its own, and which mirrors its subjects' international scope, its playful, sometimes arch, worldview, and which announces a wholly original voice.' WILL BURNS; 'It's really weird, as I am reading Olly's poems I am engaging with a part of my brain I forgot existed. It's kinda like when you try a mindfulness app and the narrator asks you to focus on or pay particular attention to eating, say, a nut or a raisin. Through his words a whole world and potential opens up, a distillation of experience that feels universal and intimate.' NICK JENSEN; 'I'm dazzled by this wonderful debut. Todd writes with a tangible physicality, solid as a curb, so that the language itself crunches, glides, grinds. A radically different way of experiencing the built and natural environment and an endlessly engaging, witty, serious and astute new voice.' LUKE KENNARD; 'Olly Todd's debut collection, Out for Air, is one of acute angles and constant surprise. His is a somewhat degraded diction, at least in the sense of his rarely reaching for an ornately lyrical register; instead there is something brutalist, a language made of concrete and artful lighting. It's rare to encounter a new poet whose work is absolutely unpredictable, from one line to the next, but Todd is capable of jarring shifts, refreshing coinages. [...] These are poems as atmosphere - rich in poise, and somewhat sui generis, blending modernist urges towards cataloguing the metropolis with something of Todd's own' Declan Ryan, The Poetry Review

Author Information

Olly Todd is a retired pro-skater living in London with his girlfriend and their daughter. His poems have appeared in Ambit, The Rialto, Vice, Test Centre, Five Dials and the Clinic anthologies. His pamphlet, Odeum Spotlights (Rough Trade Books, 2018), was long-listed for the Michael Marks Awards.

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