Release date: 1st July 2025
Attacking the airbrushed nostalgia-fuelled images of a past that didn’t exist, BLACK SKIES DIE STARLESS is a poetry collection that throws you into 1990s back streets, late-night dive bars, post-club bedsits and broken relationships fuelled by sedatives and stimulants.
Lit by chemical halos and drowning in feedback, there’s not enough neon paint for to cover up the grime or the ash, the holes in the sofa or the holes in the arms, to stop the rain or light the darkness as we chase girls who aren’t interested, boys who don’t care, and lose the ones that we love the most.
Atypical, under-diagnosed, and falling apart, Jamie’s poetry explores the mess of a young man trying to grow up in the cultural wreckage and unrelenting rhythm of grunge and rave culture, the vacuity of Cool Britannia, and the search for something, anything, to believe in.
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A signed bundle with badges and a bookmark can be ordered from Punk Dust Poetry.
Advance Praise
“Jamie Woods is one of those rare poets who can coolly hold a mirror to the darkness, then crack a grin in the reflection and make it look natural. Black Skies Die Starless hums with the energy of grunge, rave and rain-slick Swansea backstreets, blisteringly alive with honesty, wit and hard-won tenderness. His poetry crackles with the static of late-night radios and the ghosts of youth where love is accidental, memories are both real and false, and hope feels like kindling that never quite catches.
An absolute riot of a book. Read it now.”
— Natalie Ann Holborow (author of Little Universe)
“Ominous with small-town despair, Jamie Woods’ Black Skies Die Starless is a stylish coming-of-age tale, set in the 1990s. Punky and unfettered. Intense and cinematic. So evocative, a reader might glimpse themselves in the passenger seat of the next car at the red lights; spliff in hand, head back, blocking out the best years of their lives”
—Tracey Rhys (author of Bathing on the Roof)
“’Culture sucks down words’ sang the Manics in ’92. Somehow Jamie Woods has sucked up the 1990s – its culture and music, its lethal cocktail of desperation and hope, that splash of innocence and explosion of change – swirled it around and spat it back out in this brilliant poetic sequence that defies nostalgia and a saccharine retelling of the Gen X legacy.
His latest collection, the defiantly titled Black Skies Die Starless, hits all the right spots – the pill, thrills and buzzkills of youth. I highly recommend you suck it all up in one long fix – preferably under neon half-light.”
— JP Seabright (poet, co-editor of eff-able)
“With Black Skies Die Starless, Jamie Woods spits in the face of nostalgia porn with a collection of direct and sincere poetry set against the backdrop of 1990s South London and South Wales.
While this is poetry that tackles loss, loneliness, and the death rattle of small-town industry, salvation can be found shrieking in the battered cassettes of American musical angst, offering a gleam of light through the pitch-black valleys and suburban boredom of Woods’ youth.
Hopeful poetry of a hopeless time.”
— Dean Rhetoric (author of Foundry Songs and Cancer [+ Pop Punk])
Reviews
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Jamie Woods '77 