Poets Are Eaten as a Delicacy in Japan

“It’s not the worst thing, matricide. I thought about it regularly – it used to help me get to sleep at night. But the older I got, the less Mater mattered. Until that Sunday in February, when Georgie rang at eight in the morning to ask if I would come to her house and bring at least five bottles of bleach.”

Poets Are Eaten as a Delicacy in Japan opens as thirty-year-old Tommie Shaw is shown a newspaper report by her Dettol-huffing sister, Georgie, revealing that their estranged mother, Gloria, is set to expose the family’s sad and sordid history in a scandalous new memoir. What follows is a hilarious and touching black comedy, as Tommie and Georgie’s panic spirals and they clamber to control Gloria, while dealing with the painful legacy of their childhood in an eccentric Irish commune.

With unforgettable characters such as Tommie’s monstrous boss, Jude, marketing man and luckless poet Kevin Loane, and a limo full of Morrissey impersonators – including Tommie’s best friend, Blob – Poets Are Eaten as a Delicacy in Japan is a calamitous scramble through modern life and ultimately, a story about facing fears and moving on.