This image is the cover for the book Play With Me

Play With Me

The acclaimed Scottish poet’s debut collection shares poems “so physical you can almost touch the images in them. Fabulously sensual and alive.” (Stephen Fry).

Writer and performer Michael Pederson has built a reputation as a critically acclaimed poet-provocateur. His live readings are as memorable as they are witty, laced with an electric energy, as he recites his accessible yet deeply layered poetry from memory.

From NHS overdose clinics to overrun gardens, talking Cambodian treehouses to the teenage perversion of a young Scot on a French Exchange, the poems in Pedersen’s first collection offer a rich and fantastical feast of flavors, landscapes and language. On the menu is everything from iced oysters and chateaubriand to pickled onions and Buckfast-soaked bread sticks.

Michael Pedersen

Michael Pedersen (b. 1984) is a poet, playwright and animateur with an electric reputation on the performance circuit and a prolific precedent of collaborations, having teamed up with some of the UK's top musicians, film-makers and artists. He is widely published in magazines, journals, anthologies and e-zines; his inaugural chapbook 'Part-Truths' (Koo Press) was a Callum MacDonald Memorial Award finalist; its sequel 'The Basic Algebra of Buttering Bread' (Windfall Books) received flocks of reviewer plaudits. He is co-founder and circus master at Neu! Reekie! - now one of the country's most formidable literary nights and DIY record labels - and a key creative within Dream Tower Productions. He's also the lyricist for cult band Jesus, Baby! and has written short plays for various troupes including the National Theatre of Scotland. Having travelled the world and taught in Cambodia for a year, Pedersen writes verse that gives a vivid idea of what it is to be young, socially aware and irrepressibly optimistic in the melting pot of the twenty-first century. He also enjoys sewing.

Birlinn Ltd