In Milk Snake, Toby Buckley invites us to look at the world from a slightly different angle, where small things become unsettling if you look closely enough. The poet explores queerness, displacement and trauma through clear-voiced, deceptively gentle poems about fishermen, maggots and bees.
bleary
from sleep and warm
water and no glasses
i spot an uncertain comma
sliding
he drags his tail up my
shower wall cumbersome
and not unmaggotesque and i
can see
his guts
or maybe it's
his dinner

- from 'companion'

Toby Buckley is an archivist and writer from Donegal, currently based in Belfast. He completed his MA in Creative Writing (Poetry) at the Seamus Heaney Centre at Queen's University Belfast as the first recipient of the Ruth West Poetry Award Scholarship. His work has appeared in numerous literary publications including Poetry Ireland Review, The Stinging Fly, Channel Magazine and the Doire Press anthology, Empty House (2021).