18:30

Monitor Books hosts an evening of readings and music to celebrate Remi Graves’ coal (Monitor, 2025). With readings from Remi Graves, Victoria Adukwei-Bulley, dove / Christine Kirubi, and sounds by Jax Harms. 

Food, drinks & books available to purchase at Present Tense

About Coal:

BLACKFRIARS BRIDGE, 1905. A Black Cherokee man looking for his wife is arrested and charged as a ‘wandering lunatic’. In the City of London asylum, he is photographed; looking directly at the camera, he insists and refuses. He dies in the asylum one year later.

In the absence of Paul Downing’s own account, Remi Graves writes from and into the trans archive, presenting a sequence of poems and experiments mapping resonances between selves across historical records. Through river crossings and library passes, chance meetings and visitations, coal is a document that interrogates what we do with the scattered fragments of a life.

coal was one of the winners of the 2024 Prototype Prize.

Bios:

Remi Graves is a poet and drummer from London. A former Barbican Young Poet, their work has been featured on BBC Radio4, at St Paul’s Cathedral and in various anthologies. Their debut pamphlet, with your chest, was published by fourteen poems in 2022. coal won the inaugural Prototype Prize (short form category) in 2024.

dove, Christine Kirubi is a poet-artist based in London. She is the author of WILDPLASSEN published by the87press and Partures. published by Gong Farm.

Victoria Adukwei Bulley is a poet, writer and artist. An alumna of the Barbican Young Poets and recipient of an Eric Gregory award, Victoria has held residencies in the US, Brazil and the V&A Museum in London. Her debut pamphlet, Girl B, was published by the African Poetry Book Fund in 2017. She is the recipient of a Techne scholarship for doctoral research at Royal Holloway, University of London. Her debut collection, Quiet, was published by Faber in 2022. It was shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize and won the Rathbones Folio Prize for Poetry and the John Pollard Foundation International Poetry Prize.

Jax Harms is a trans vocalist, songwriter, and guitarist whose work moves between folk, roots, and blues traditions. A member of Trans Voices, the UK’s first professional trans+ vocal collective, Jax explores the intersections of voice, identity and inheritance. Where song becomes both archive and act of becoming.

SOLD OUT: Please email hello@presenttense.co.uk for waiting list