Out-Spoken: June — Daisy Lafarge, Ange Mlinko, Pascale Petit
Southbank Centre's monthly poetry and live music night features Daisy Lafarge, Ange Mlinko, and Pascale Petit performing alongside world-class musicians in the Queen Elizabeth Hall.
Why we picked this
Pascale Petit's nature-saturated, Amazonia-rooted poems alongside Daisy Lafarge's forensic attention to ecology and language — two poets who take the non-human world seriously, in the same room.
Out-Spoken returns for its June edition at the Queen Elizabeth Hall, the Southbank Centre’s resident poetry and live music night that has become one of London’s most reliably surprising evenings. Hosted by TS Eliot Prize and Polari Prize-winning poet Joelle Taylor, with DJ Sam ‘Junior’ Bromfield providing a backdrop of reggae, soul, and R&B, the night brings together three poets whose work spans ecology, landscape, and the strange pressures of contemporary life.
Daisy Lafarge — whose debut collection Life Without Air won widespread acclaim for its examination of power, intimacy, and the natural world — brings her restless linguistic intelligence to the stage. Ange Mlinko, American poet and critic, joins from across the Atlantic with a body of work that moves between lyric precision and intellectual ambition. And Pascale Petit, whose collections draw on the Amazon rainforest and Venezuelan childhood, brings some of the most visually arresting imagery in contemporary poetry.
The Out-Spoken format — poetry woven through with live music rather than presented in reverential silence — makes for something closer to a gig than a reading, and the atmosphere at Queen Elizabeth Hall reflects that. Whether you come as a dedicated poetry reader or simply someone curious about what language can do at its most concentrated, this is an evening built to surprise.