Unfortunately, Pascal O’Loughlin is unable to read at our our next event on Tuesday 31st October. His place will be taken by Scott Thurston, who will be reading from his brand new book Poems for the Dance. See above for a film of Scott performing with Steve Boyland and one from our own archive.

The other readers will be James Davies and Stephen Mooney. We will still be at The Castle Hotel, Oldham Street, Manchester and the Other Room will still be, as always, free. We hope to see you there.

Scott Thurston is a poet, mover and educator working in higher education in Manchester, UK. He has published twelve books and chapbooks of poetry, including three full-length collections with Shearsman: Hold (2006), Momentum (2008) and Internal Rhyme (2010). More recent work includes Reverses Heart’s Reassembly (Veer, 2011), Figure Detached Figure Impermanent(Oystercatcher, 2014) and, just out, Poems for the Dance (Aquifer, 2017). He edited The Salt Companion to Geraldine Monk (2007) and in 2011, Shearsman published his collection of four long interviews with the poets Karen Mac Cormack, Jennifer Moxley, Caroline Bergvall and Andrea Brady, called Talking Poetics. Scott is founding co-editor of the open access Journal of British and Irish Innovative Poetry and co-organizer of the long-running poetry reading series The Other Room in Manchester. Since 2004, he has been developing a poetics integrating dance and poetry which has seen him collaborating with dancers in Berlin and New York as well as in the UK.

Poems for the Dance (Aquifer Books, 2017) contains an essay and poems occasioned by Scott’s engagement with Five Rhythms and other improvised dance and movement practices over more than a decade. The book is a multi-faceted enquiry into the relationship between poetry and movement, exploring the shared vitality dynamics of both artistic forms as it seeks for personal, social and political truths. With an introduction by Camilla Nelson and photographs by Roger Bygott.