Stalking Paloma is award-winning poet Ifor Thomas’s follow-up to his Welsh Book of the Year shortlisted Body Beautiful. Central to this collection is an arresting and original sequence exploring the obsessive nature of fandom and its pursuit through social media. Staking out the territories of Facebook and Twitter, Thomas is witness to the interplay of intimacy and alienation which has increasingly come to define twenty-first century life. Elsewhere, his other preoccupations come to the fore: the changing face of Cardiff, negotiations with the past, mortality, and poetry – and the personalities that populate his art. With a love of the noir and a sly, mordant wit, Thomas delivers a performance as entertaining as it is essential. “In Ifor Thomas we have a real 21st Century voice; a voice that can make itself heard above the roar of traffic and the noise of kids as they come out of school. Ifor’s is the kind of poetic voice we need in these loud times. Listen to it now.” Ian MacMillan
