What: New Poems from the Poet Laureate of Punk

Dr John Cooper Clarke’s dazzling, scabrous voice has reverberated through pop culture for decades, his influence on generations of performance poets and musicians plain for all to see. In WHAT, the original ’People’s Poet’ comes storming out of the gate with an uproarious new collection, reminding us why he is one of Britain’s most beloved writers and performers. James Brown, John F. Kennedy, Jesus Christ: nobody is safe from the punk rocker’s acerbic pen - and that’s just the first poem.

Hot on the heels of The Luckiest Guy Alive and his sprawling, encyclopaediac memoir I Wanna Be Yours, the good Doctor returns with his most trenchant collection of poems yet. Vivid and alive, with a sensitivity only a writer with a life as varied and extraordinary as Cooper Clarke’s could summon, WHAT is an exceptional collection from one of our foremost satirists.

John Cooper Clarke shot to prominence in the 1970s as the original ’people’s poet’. Since then his career has spanned cultures, audiences, art forms and continents. Today, Cooper Clarke is as relevant and vibrant as ever, and his influence is just as visible on today’s pop culture. His new poems were collected in The Luckiest Guy Alive, which was followed by a bestselling autobiography I Wanna Be Yours and poetry collection WHAT. Aside from his trademark ’look’ continuing to resonate with fashionistas young and old, and his poetry included on the national curriculum syllabus, his effect on modern life is huge.