Friend (eBook)

I text you how much ?it hurts not to see you. Here are poems about love, loss, mothers, fathers, God, rain and growing up. About all the things that poems are always about, in fact, with one crucial difference. Instead of being remembered from an adult distance, these poems were written by a diverse group of teenagers direct from their own experience. So as well as being clever, funny and moving, they are also immediate - they go straight to the heart like a text from a friend. Most of these poems are by pupils from a single multicultural comprehensive school, Oxford Spires Academy. Many have already been social media sensations: some students' poems, for instance, have been retweeted over 100,000 times. A donation from the sale of this book will be made to the charity Asylum Welcome.

Kate Clanchy is a writer, teacher and journalist. Her writing has won many prizes, including a Forward Prize, the BBC National Short Story Award and the Orwell Book Prize for Political Writing. A previous anthology of her students' work, England: Poems from a School, was published to great acclaim in 2018. She tweets as @KateClanchy1