Trust a Poet

Last night I saw my friend Tyler Hamilton launch his debut poetry collection, Trust a Poet To..., in a room full of brightness and love.

I first met Tyler at a bookshop in East London. I was eating chips and working on what would become Twenty-Eight, and he was there with a friend browsing books.

I offered him some chips. I gained a friend.

And now, just a few short years later, Tyler has done something many people spend their whole lives hoping they might one day be brave enough to do. He has gathered his words, his feelings, his memories, his absurdities, his longings, his love, his hurt, his questions, his selfhood, and placed them into a book. Not a folder. Not a notes app. A book.

There is something especially moving about watching someone step into that moment for the first time. I remember it from my own experience. The strange disbelief of seeing your inner world made physical.

And last night, we gathered in person to celebrate the new arrival. And oh, did it arrive.

The event was hosted by Hamish Steele, writer and artist behind the DeadEndia and Go-Man comics, and Dead End: Paranormal Park. His work so beautifully explores identity, family, acceptance, and the families we make for ourselves when the world requires us to become creative with love.

Hamish was the perfect person to host. In Dead End, Barney struggles towards acceptance, but also finds something wider and warmer than simple permission. He finds people. He finds belonging.

My own work explores this, too. David, Joshua, and Jayce all benefit from the messy, complicated, beautiful overlap between real family and found family in the Reality Quake series.

Last night, Tyler’s parents were in the audience. So were his friends, colleagues, and a whole constellation of chosen family. People from different corners of his life gathered together in one room to say, in their presence if nothing else: we see you, we love you, we are proud of you.

Art imitates life. Life imitates art.

Sometimes, if you are lucky, art and life sit together on a Friday night and listen to some brilliant poetry.

I had the enormous honour of writing the foreword for Tyler’s book. I did not take that lightly. To be trusted with the first few pages of someone else’s book is a strange and humbling thing. A foreword should never feel like the main event - it's a door held open, a hand on the shoulder, a small push from the dock before the real voyage begins.

I wrote in that foreword that Tyler’s work is “poetry that does not ask permission.” I meant it then, and I mean it even more now.

His work is clever, touching, romantic, funny, strange, sharp, and deeply human. It understands that poetry does not need to be locked behind gates or guarded by people who believe you must study it before you are allowed to feel it. It belongs to people. To lovers. To strangers. To anyone who has ever picked up a book out of curiosity and found themselves unexpectedly seen.

Hearing him read last night only confirmed it.

I am proud of Tyler. Proud as a friend. Proud as a fellow poet. Proud, too, in that slightly ridiculous queer elder way, which mostly means I get to stand nearby making encouraging noises and pretending I know what I am doing, simply because I'm not in my twenties anymore.

But more than proud, I'm incredibly grateful.

Grateful to have been in the room. Grateful to have heard his poems in his voice. Grateful to have watched family, friends, art, life, and poetry all come together for an evening in Covent Garden.

Trust a Poet To... is out there in the world now, waiting for you to discover it.

So, trust a poet.

Trust this poet.

Pick up the book and let it take you somewhere.