You are welcome to attend the launch of our third and final chapbook this year, In Rooms of Falling Rain, by Tom McLaughlin.

In Rooms of Falling Rain explores the relationship between queer domestic space and creative work. The collection complicates this relationship by showing how trauma, instability, and marginalisation experienced at home, can become creatively fertile.

Many poems are anchored in historic queer homes, tracing how poetic forms emerge from particular spatial and social conditions. At its centre is Tom’s father’s death and the Donegal landscapes that shaped both their childhoods. His presence was a defining force in Tom’s experience of domestic life, and his father’s absence raises new questions for Tom about what home means and what remains after it ruptures. The Donegal poems act as both anchor and counterpoint to the queer domestic spaces elsewhere in the collection.

Andrew McMillan describes this work as follows: "Gorgeous, precise poems, which beautifully speak to what it is to be both inside and outside of the domestic, its familiar expectations and its relationships. A collection I wish I could move into, and live inside".