I gulped down #wildtwin by Jeff Young yesterday in a single sitting, drugged by the words, wandering in a waking dream through the beautiful chaos of a poet's Amsterdam, Paris and Liverpool.
Published by Little Toller 🇺🇦🇵🇸, September -- I can't wait for you all to experience it

Well look at THAT for news to gladden your heart! New Jeff Young book incoming!!! x x x #WildTwin ❤️📚❤️📚❤️📚

A great privilege to be among the very first to read Jeff Young on his father & caring for him through the long silences & shadows of Alzheimers. The warmest, most moving piece of writing I've read, filled with quintessential #wildtwin humour & strangeness. Read on:

Beautiful ❤️ #WildTwin by Jeff Young
To be released…

Got as far as the last page with nowhere further to go...
So started reading again.
Now
Looking forward to #WildTwin
🎂

'This is the city, the hallucination. Melancholy angels in a secret church and a derelict gasworks sinking into the mud; cormorants like tattered Christs on the rotting hulk of a tugboat. I fall in love with a magical illusion.'

Amsterdam again.

#wildtwin

Here's a thread then, a Saturday treat, a longer glimpse into Jeff Young walking with his #wildtwin through cinematic streets & motorway edges, hitchhiking to Paris, chasing poetry & delusion, and always always remembering Liverpool, still walking & dreaming those streets:

'Nostalgia is an illness, perhaps. And yet, it’s beautiful. I live in the present but the past is here, sometimes shimmering, sometimes dimming in the same space as the now. The blackberries I picked beyond the school fence sixty years ago still taste beautiful now.'

#wildtwin

Enjoy a #wildtwin vignette, c/o Jeff Young:

'We’ve just stolen Harry’s fridge and we’re carrying it across the Marnixstraat lift bridge when we bump into Harry. He stops to chat amiably, and we put the fridge down and do the small talk. It’s awkward...

This is how it begins: 'There are horses and angels and a broken bird in a shoebox nest. Soon it will be daylight, and my dad will come home from the printing factory nightshift. I don’t want him to come home, or rather when he does come home, I want to be invisible.'

#wildtwin

But it's not the start Jeff Young was hoping for: 'I get a room, lie awake in bed, tears falling. For months I’ve thought about EUROPE, about being far away from home. And now I’m in Europe for the first time in my life, all I can think about is Liverpool.'

#wildtwin

'One night I performed a magic ritual and wedged seeds and bird skulls into cracks in the wall of a new block of luxury apartments – a hex on brain-dead redevelopment, like placing cassettes of pagan information into the dead soul of a new building. Planting seeds.'
#wildtwin

Jeff Young The Reader at Calderstones The Reader Dr Maria Barrett How brilliant Jeff, and all this travelling to far flung places for #wildtwin so happy to see this. Xxx