Clueless Dogs

Winner of the 2013 Wales Book of the Year, the People''s Choice Award and the Roland Mathias Prize for Poetry.

Shortlisted for the 2012 Forward Prize for Best First Collection.

The poems in this collection recall imaginative escapes from a fraught childhood in Bridgend, through chronicles of teenage lust and student rivalries, to the damaged peers and tense situations of adult life. Full of verve, humour and spiky syntax, her work has a winning, unflinching honesty and intensity that have quickly garnered many admirers.

"Supremely crafted... inhabited by something far rarer, an unerring ability to find the extraordinary in the ordinary." Time Out

"She captures and subverts cliche for poetry''s purpose, lets sound ring in the lines, weaves common speech with lyrical language..."
Gillian Clarke

"The unique voice lies in the music of the language, a distinctly un-English sound, often in a minor key, elegiac but with unexpected leaps of the imagination."
Hugo Williams

"Rhian Edwards makes the language sing and dance. Join her campaign for the liberation of poetry from all that is dry, stuffy, insincere and boring…"
Christopher Reid

"[An] astounding Welsh poet with performances that get you in the emotional gut…"
Ian McMillan on BBC Radio 3

Born in Bridgend, Rhian Edwards is a poet and singer-songwriter. Her pamphlet Parade the Fib (Tall Lighthouse, 2008) was a Poetry Book Society Pamphlet Choice. Her poems have appeared in the TLS, Poetry Review, the Spectator, Poetry London, Poetry Wales and the London Magazine. She has performed in over 300 stage, radio and festival performances worldwide, including at the Edinburgh Fringe, Ledbury and Latitude Festivals, and recently won the 2011 John Tripp Spoken Poetry Award. Her poems have also been exhibited at the Royal Festival Hall in London.