Numbered Boxes

Numbered Boxes is a journey through the stanzas of school days, family, work addiction, heartbreak and back into school as a teacher. Much of the book was written while Pete was a full time poetry teacher in a secondary school in East London, as part of a world first pilot project, the Spoken Word Education Programme. Many of the poems present formats that invite young poets to tell their story. The result is an edifice filled with confessions on his own youth, and the continued troubles of adulthood. The rooms we inhabit make up the story of our lives. They are all connected, sometimes as points of intense isolation. What walls are built around our minds by our past, present and futures? The book opens the lid on containers built by institutions and those harder to unpack, the ones built by ourselves. The final section of the book breaks free from the shadows of these confines and escapes into the debauchery of mid-summer, drawing on a body of work written while Pete was Glastonbury poet in residence, 2015. Numbered boxes channels with energy and wit of his stage poetry to a body of lyric, narrative and comically surreal poetry, crafted to deliver on the page.