Ian Humphreys

Ian lives in West Yorkshire. His debut collection Zebra (Nine Arches Press) was nominated for the Portico Prize. His work is widely published in journals, including The Poetry Review, The Rialto and Magma, and he has written for the BBC. Awards include first prize in the Hamish Canham Prize and highly commended in the Forward Prizes for Poetry. Ian is the editor of Why I Write Poetry (Nine Arches Press, 2021), the producer and co-editor of a forthcoming anthology on Sylvia Plath (Nine Arches Press, 2022), and a guest editor at Butcher’s Dog poetry magazine.

www.ianhumphreyspoet.com

‘In all of its magnificent bounty Zebra must be one of the poetry collections of 2019.’

– The Yorkshire Times, June 2019

‘In the funny and tender Bad Fruit a fashionable cologne smells of “over-ripe” pears or possibly “unbottled men” – a brilliant phrase. Oscar Wilde is an important figure, but a melancholy and distant one who “sang his ballad / from a mauve cage”, in a lovely image from Another Boy’s Story … Bare Branch is beautifully precise and balanced, exquisitely weighted, full of delicate exactness, poignant, deep and free of cultural cliché … with a clever image of mah jong tiles “clattering like tiny feet through the house”, it is an extraordinary feat of tact and complexity.’

– The Poetry Review, Vol 109, No 2, Summer 2019

‘The closing sentence of Under the microscope, about a laboratory dissection, reads “Art too wields the knife.” Confident, incisive, tender and sensual, Humphreys’ voice is leavened by a Puckish wit … Zebra reads not like a debut, but the virtuoso singing of an assured voice.’

– Orbis (No 189, Autumn 2019)

‘Ian Humphreys’ Zebra has come out to a deluge of praise and it’s easy to see why.’

– The High Window, Winter 2019