Soho

How and where did you access it?

Purchase from Folyes Charring Cross Rd

How did it make you feel?

Richard Scott’s debut poetry collection, Soho, was an incredible wake-up call in my recognition of the necessary political implications of queerness, of the fraught historical struggle LGBTQ+ subjects have faced, and of the necessity to constantly remember the efforts of our queer brothers and sisters who came before us which have given us the rights we have today. Scott’s tracing of the erased queer histories of our city in his witty, inventive, and always highly-emotive poetic idiom was like hearing for the first time the voice of a queer prophet crying in the wilderness, which I’ll never forget.

Did you share it?

Of course!

Is there anything else you would like to tell us about it?

Scott’s collection of poems makes for great comparison with other literary attempts to recover forgotten queer histories in an urban context, particularly Neil Bartlett’s Who Was That Man? A Present for Mr Oscar Wilde, and, of course, Hollinghurst’s The Swimming Pool Library.

Chris Jones