Rabbitbox

'It's a powerful piece. Properly tunnelled into me in an intense and unforgettable way... The emphasis on love, and the way Wayne combines a symbolic iconography with real world stuff is very strong.' Max Porter

'I'm blown away. I don't read Wayne Holloway-Smith's poetry, I become immersed in its curious, skin-scraping world. In RABBITBOX he creates an atmosphere of eerie vulnerability, a 'terrible hosanna of language' that compels as powerfully as it unsettles. I felt the fraught mission of creating safety in a domesticity that could not guarantee it; of the magic tricks a mind must conjure when it lives alongside punishing, pathetic masculinity. An astonishing work.' Amy Key

'This book is amazing. Imagine a poetry version of DH Lawrence's novel Sons and Lovers blended with Han Kan's novella, The White Book. That could be said of Wayne Holloway-Smith's latest offering, RABBITBOX. Holloway-Smith is more than a talented poet, he's a gifted phrase-maker. RABBITBOX is a lyrically ambitious and powerfully evocative book on trauma and family. Truly a feat.' Raymond Antrobus

'It takes a rare poet to make such magic of such brutality, but Holloway-Smith is the rarest kind: tender, curious, vivid, and wild. He bunches language like a fist, one that unravels into shadow butterflies, the idea of escape... RABBITBOX is my book of 2026.' - Joelle Taylor

'Devastating, sharp with skilfully wrought language, this book is an ambitious leap into a lyricism that dissembles' Guardian