I can’t tell you how much I’ve looked forward to writing this. Both since I signed the deal with Broken Sleep in August 2025 and since I started writing and performing poetry way back in 2006.
My début adult poetry collection, Peacocks Can’t Swim, is published on 31 January and is available to pre-order now. There’s also a special offer — exclusive to Substack — at the bottom of the post!
I never meant to wait this long to publish an adult poetry collection. To be blunt, in those early days, I wrote with one output in mind: a battered SM-58 microphone in a sticky-floored music venue.
The unlikely gig compère of the late ‘00s “New Yorkshire” indie scene, described by a reviewer as “charismatically uncouth”, with nothing but a John Cooper Clarke bootleg album on my iPod by way of poetic education.
Within a few months, a Sheffield-based songwriter/producer discovered the poems on MySpace Music, and an unlikely partnership formed — Skint & Demoralised. Our rise was so meteoric, it almost guaranteed failure.
From Universal HQ in Kensington to Daptone Studios in Brooklyn to the Roundhouse in Camden to a hotel room in Ullapool. Booze-fuelled, head-wrecking, turbo-speed shenanigans, with a healthy dose of industry exploitation, and the full weight of neurodivergence nearly two decades before diagnosis.
I returned to poetry in 2013. I did a week’s run at the Edinburgh Fringe in summer 2015. When I received an unexpected windfall from the Nationwide ad in 2016, I never considered investing in anything but a full-length show. Two Little Ducks embarked on a full run at the Fringe in 2017 before touring the UK in autumn 2018. VERVE published the show’s poems, so I had a book, but the show came first.
As the dust settled, I felt strongly that one of the show’s most important poems — Voids Tempting Mischief — needed its own project. This project was my primary focus until 2023 and ultimately became my début novel, Bouncing Bricks.
With the novel out on submission, I realised what my next project needed to be: an adult poetry collection about those hazy, chaotic, disturbing, and utterly surreal music industry days. And so, here we are.
To be upfront, I’d never written about my music industry experience. I rarely speak about it, either — there are people I’ve been friends with for years who don’t know about it.
It also took me a long time to get over it. I only truly started to do so when I fell in love with Maria in my late ‘20s. In hindsight, the experience did a fair bit of psychological damage, and much as I realise there are far worse experiences to have, I felt like it was something I needed to explore properly. And it felt like poetry, in written form, was the only way to do so.
After working on the collection for six months or so, I plucked up the courage to email Molly Naylor and ask if she’d be open to mentoring me. Fortunately, Molly was game, and we worked together throughout most of 2024.
Molly’s expertise and guidance helped to grow my idea into the collection it needed to be. She helped me develop it and push it to the point I felt confident enough to send it to Broken Sleep, and even though I’d backed myself to “take that shot”, I was gobsmacked when Aaron and his team picked it up for publication.
I only started sending poems out to mags/journals and entering them into competitions/prizes when I began working on this collection. This was a whole new world, and honestly, I didn’t have much luck (half a dozen wins versus hundreds of rejections).
Was it useful? I’m not sure. As much as I challenged myself to be more experimental and push beyond my poetic comfort zone, I also had to stay as true to my ‘voice’ as possible, without compromising in the pursuit of entries and submissions.
It’s easy to believe that what you’re doing is worthless when all you face is rejection after rejection, but any success in those fields is a bonus, and nothing should supersede the true purpose of the project you’re working on.
So, that’s how the collection came into existence. It feels surreal to be publishing it so far into my career, and I’m excited to see how it gets on in the world.
The audio version
Because of my career background, it only felt right to record an audio version of the collection. An album sampler will be available to stream on the major platforms, and the full album will be available to purchase via Bandcamp.
This was professionally recorded in Leeds with special thanks to The Square Ball for free use of their studio. It’s very important to me that there’s an audio version because listening to poetry was how I discovered (and fell in love with) it, and I appreciate that this may make it more accessible for some people to consume.
The book launch
Finally, if you’re local to West Yorkshire, I’m doing a book launch at Hyde Park Book Club in Leeds on Tuesday 26 January. Tickets cost £3 (or £14.99 with a copy of the book!) Buy them here.
I’ll do a live set followed by an informal Q&A, and there’ll be plenty of opportunities for some poetry-based socialising, too! The event will take place upstairs in the Snug as opposed to downstairs in the Basement, and I’m sure it’ll be a cosy and chilled affair.
Praise for Peacocks Can’t Swim
“Peacocks Can’t Swim represents a remarkable transformation in the work of an already accomplished writer. This is poetry operating at the peak of its powers: these poems reveal, provoke, invite, are unashamed, complicate without obfuscating, are frank without simplifying. These are bold, nuanced, compelling works; sometimes funny, sometimes gut-wrenching, but always beautifully layered and strikingly generous in their vulnerability and scope.” Molly Naylor
“I could spend all day in the company of Matt Abbott’s poems and never get bored. Formally inventive, attuned to the ways people really speak and the ways they really think – this is a poet who could tackle any subject and make it feel new, challenging and relatable all at the same time.” Helen Mort FRSL
“Whether he’s giving us a glimpse behind music industry machinations or exploring the angst of becoming, Abbott offers insight and tonic to a generation of men pulled in a thousand different directions. The poetry here is intimate, relatable and thoughtful and serves as a handbook for the paranoias, pains and passions of masculinity. From indie sleaze hedonism to tender reflections on parenting and marriage, Abbott’s writing always retains his charm, verve and a good dose of Northern warmth.” Michael Mullen
“I enjoyed diving into the deep end of Matt Abbott’s latest work, Peacocks Can’t Swim — a bright and stunning collection, a timely exploration of a life lived in full colour. Such a refreshing honesty in every generous page. I found this new poetry incredibly moving, profoundly personal and wildly provocative.” Salena Godden FRSL
“These songs of innocence and experience are united by Matt Abbott’s ability to tell stories that sizzle off the page, like a car burning down the road, leaving us dazed and exhilarated. Carrying us on journeys from the past to the present, the poems here are ordered by a willingness to grapple with narratives of self and society. In its declaration that “this isn’t the world they sold you”, this collection mirrors the multiple levels of anomie that are now a part of the vernacular of living. A moving, memorable playlist of noughties-era yearning.” Andre Bagoo
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