Adam Crothers

@severaldeer.bsky.social

112 Followers 178 Following

Only a rhymester. Home to My Cats (April 2026) w/ @brokensleepbooks.bsky.social; Several Deer & The Culture of My Stuff w/ @carcanet.bsky.social; Girton Time w/ Beam Editions. Bye-Fellow, @girtoncollege.bsky.social. SF, TTRPGS, lemurs. He/him.

Marlowe, a blue British shorthair, being a floor cat.
Two British shorthair kittens, one blue (dark grey) and characteristically blurry and one a lilac (light pinkish-yellowish grey) tabby, lie on some underbed storage under a bed in their new home on 29 April 2023, and look towards the viewer as much as their developing facial muscles will permit. They are wonderful.
(The day the kittens gelled into cats, I bought them gelato adapted for pets,
Two British shorthair kittens, one lilac (light grey) and the other blue (dark grey), stand on a grey-carpeted landing and are perfect.
An asterisk, surely.
A lovely fox on a gravel path by some greenery; a bench’s arm rest runs along the bottom edge of the photograph.
My kittens, not nearly as white as I’m, make similar uses to me of time. They dream of downing moth or widgeon; I seek to impale what’s purely imaginary.
Charles Bukowski’s On Cats on a cat. The first is a green paperback bearing an image of a black cat; the second is a lilac British shorthair kitten who goes by Harriet.
I explain to the kittens,
The Prince of Shadows and the Lady of Sharpness occupy the room as giddying gas, easy as unease. Above not being underfoot, they rumble like excavations, tick like minesweepers. They’re phoning it in, ‘it’ being an airstrike: they’ve positioned, some allege, archers
Boris Vian’s Blues for a Black Cat next to my Home to My Cats: both are blue and yellow, and black-catted, and while there’s no white on my front cover there’s white text on the back.
Lightnin’ Hopkins don’t want no woman whose hair ain’t no longer’n his. Lightnin’ Hopkins died on that hill whose hair was short as his. Yeah: you die on a hill with lightnin’ hoppin’ all up and down in yer biz.
Two anthropomorphic cats, drawn in black on white, stand upright on their hind legs, and give it some attitude against a pale orange-pink background of swirling brushstrokes.
A heap of grey, granular cat litter against a white background.
A sleeping cat modelled in white Japanese pottery.
Detail from Murakami’s ‘Japan Supernatural: Vertiginous After Staring at the Empty World Too Intensely, I Found Myself Trapped in the Realm of Lurking Ghosts and Monsters’: an enormous superflat cat with multicoloured irises is surrounded by all manner of zany figures.
A cat has a pact with a stranger, an elder: the Queen in Yellow, the King in Fog, the patron whose fingers snap fiercer than dog,
Leonard Cohen in black tie stands next to Taylor Swift in lilac, and they both look to camera. In ‘Betty’, TS really should have sung about the dark, not the far, side of the gym, but I like to think it was a ‘Memories’ reference anyway.
Henriëtte Ronner-Knip: The Musicians Wherein the instrument’s so tired it can but squeeze another teard- rop kitten from its strung- out eye, which is staring you down. Eventually the image will blink, shut up, hide its little face. Mahogany tides flow till they’re barrels of cats, poor loaves levering open the guitar’s figurative oven door, heaving up catgut – sure – and tabbylature.
A Dutch painting wherein a mother cat nuzzles one kitten while the other three mess with an guitar: two, sitting on a slithered collection of sheet music, play with broken strings, while the last pokes a head and a paw out of the sound hole. It’s all adorable.
In Arthur Rackham’s magnificent illustration, a yellow-eyed black cat, lower teeth exposed, flowers from a bough; clouds scrape the sky, and red-lit turrets smoulder in the distance.
Leonard Cohen, in black tie, tips his hat to Taylor Swift (who wears a lilac dress) while shaking her hand; Judy Collins, in white, looks on. Judy Collins isn’t in this poem, but her version of ‘Send in the Clowns’ plays at the beginning and the end of my first book and I’m sure I’ll come back to her someday.
In Franz Marc’s painting, a couple of Expressionist cats, blue and yellow, express themselves, surrounded by Expressionist flowers and fruits in the garden of, in the background, a green-roofed white-walled Expressionist house.
A sculpture of the poet Kathleen Raine, her hands on the very fine cat in her lap.
The kittens’ not technically believing in the efficacy of these vaccines – flu, leukaemia, enteritis – has the bearing of a foam sphere. Treats for all, and the soft deities are poured back into their carrier, smoky libations. If all gods are false then falseness should be flagged as a given: no longer a meaningful factor in the whole kerfuffle.
A ‘lilac’ (light, yellowish-pinkish grey) female British shorthair kitten perches on a windowsill, plotting the death of the ape behind the camera.
Three copies of the pamphlet Home to My Cats (the cover featuring a feline silhouette within a yellow pane in an otherwise blue and black grid) are invitingly fanned on a wooden desk. You want to buy so, so many of these.
A photograph wherein a ‘blue’ (dark grey) male British shorthair kitten, on a step carpeted in a more institutional grey, gives the camera an intense and serious look.
Louise Bourgeois’s artwork The Angry Cat depicts a wonderfully cat looking at the viewer, its patterning resembling more than anything else the pebbles that rise in a baker’s Zen garden.
Aubade #57 Stormfront and ceasefire, charcoal rods braced in tandem, yoked world-serpents swallowing everything that fits, those mythological ravens, Moodswing and Whim, form themselves at first light into eddying cats. Doodling dusty forecasts on a carpeted sunpatch, they’re less than whelmed by the vox, the guitars. No fussy dirge I fingerpick, no noodly pentatone, could itch its X upon the pitch their breakfast requests attain. All needle, no syringe, they’re song but they ain’t talk. They stalk the plush duck I dangle, a sweet plum, a punchline. We imagine we’re killing it. A stroke from their paw-stashed styluses draws the unlucky ducky as maelstrom: doom sheathed in down. Flickknife as distaff. When I pluck a blunted E string’s tarnished filament, I feel lovely and cruel as the kitties I live with.
For he can tread to all the measures upon the music. – Christopher Smart
A poem excerpt: ‘The pen gets cat | scratch fever when I | hold it right.’
Home to My Cats is deliciously strange and sincere, celebrating cats in all their tender/violent contradictions. Crothers commits to his subject without irony, like a cat stalking a toy with the ferocity needed to fell a rat. Unlike Eliot’s ranging jellicle ensemble, Crothers gives us just two cats to track, each of whom contains multitudes: Harriet and Marlowe trot between worlds, shapeshifting into spies, pets and little household gods, described by dancing, frisking language: words merge and warp, snuggling meowlogisms alongside nods to Christopher Smart’s Jubilate Agno, while rhymes blend, blur and contrast like pigments on a coat (the staccato of a Bengal’s spots, the repeated swipes of a tabby’s stripes). The reader stops and starts like a shrew below a lifted paw, waiting (and perhaps hoping) for it to clap back down. — Kirsten Irving
From the Broken Sleep website: ‘Home to My Cats by Adam Crothers is a fizzing, formally playful pamphlet that turns feline devotion into a poetics of art, music and mischief. These poems move between lyric address and ekphrasis, riffing on Louise Bourgeois, Franz Marc, Takashi Murakami, Louis Wain, and Arthur Rackham, while also letting Taylor Swift and Leonard Cohen wander into the cat’s-eye frame. Crothers writes with a quick, punning intelligence and a gift for the compressed song, where philosophy slides into litter-tray comedy, and tenderness is sharpened by wit. Beneath the surface-level glee sits a serious enquiry into attention, companionship and belief, as the cats become both muse and measure, their small tyrannies and private theologies remaking the home into a site of lyric necessity.’
A detail from the cover of my book Several Deer: an illustration of a woman's right profile. She wears a red hunting hat that obscures her eyes; a green feather is mounted in said hat.
A parody of a gloomy, yellow Dune film poster, generated at https://pixelframe.design/dune-font-logo-generator/, featuring the title of my poetry pamphlet Home to My Cats and the following subtitle, taken from one of the collection's poems: 'The Prince of Shadows and the Lady of Sharpness occupy the room as giddying gas, easy as unease.' Timothée Chalamet and Zendaya pose beneath the text with swords or knives or whatever, standing in, it is implied, for the dark and needle-clawed cats. I haven't seen the new Dunes yet. I do like the David Lynch one.
Eight lines of free verse. 'You are flint where the bitch-cat whelps under desert rock, or spume when brine-water sickens with sea-spawn, you are the kindless issue of the twin gulfs – storm-ridden Syrtes – of the octopus and maelstrom, epitomes of ruin.'