But & Though

By: Jake Hawkey

Narrated by: Jake Hawkey

Read by the author, Jake Hawkey.

In But & Though, Jake Hawkey scrutinizes the impact of parental addiction on families, its title a nod to the language of dependency, its circles of prevarication and excuse. Hawkey’s poems chart the loss of a father and the resilient love between siblings, and take an unflinching look at a parent–child relationship sometimes painfully inverted through alcoholism.

Hawkey’s fresh perspective and playful style introduces a vital, authentic new voice in British poetry. It will appeal also to those interested in the wider literature of addiction and the complexities of urban working-class life in Britain. Hawkey approaches these subjects from highly original and personal angles, breathing life into his characters and settings. Ultimately, we come to know a young writer attempting to ‘detach with love’ as he strides forward into his own life.

©2025 Jake Hawkey (P)2025 Macmillan Publishers International Limited

Critic reviews

Here is a wonderful new voice, full of a spiky energy accompanied by a wild imagination. His language bristles with a sense of its own freshness. His working-class world is alive and quivering. A brilliant collection. (Jay Parini, author of Borges and Me)

"A requiem to fathers, to the streets, to the estates; at times a smash in the face with a skateboard, laughing and ‘chattin breeze’. Hawkey unravels the raw truth behind grief, alcohol dependency, and family traumas, ultimately finding ‘God dwells in every man’." (Roy McFarlane, author of The Healing Next Time)

"Hawkey writes with serious ambition: these poems are daring in their formal organisation and their political intellect. There is also a real humour here, an ironic, knowing sensibility that never gets in the way of the poems' emotional contents. Hawkey tackles difficult subjects - alcohol dependency, deprivation, and intergenerational trauma - with admirable lucidity, attuned to both their tragedy and comedy (Padraig Regan, author of the Forward Prize-shortlisted Some Integrity)