The seventh title from Analog Submission Press in 2026 is Gwil James Thomas’s Suburban War Cry.

This is Gwil’s third solo chapbook with ASP, following Hidden Icons & Secret Menus (2018) and Cocoon Transitions (2020). He also appeared alongside John D. Robinson in the 2018 split chapbook Romance, Renegades & Riots.

Suburban War Cry collects poems of memory, home, class, masculinity, movement, boredom, anxiety and the comedy of ordinary life. Gwil covers boarded-up houses, buses, bedsits, dead Christmas trees, toilet cisterns, peanut butter, fortune cookies, fried yucas and walks that lead nowhere in particular. And Bristol sits behind it all: part home, part memory, part city under pressure.

These poems are caught between movement and stasis, nostalgia, unease, the absurd, and the sincere. The ordinary tends to give way to something larger, more significant: a broken toilet becomes a measure of time, a childhood dog becomes an emblem of freedom, and an uneventful morning at home becomes something that may one day be impossible to recover.

In this conversation, Gwil talks about suburbia, childhood memory, home, humour, masculinity, class, Bristol, artificial intelligence, movement, and the uncertain process of turning experience into poems.

The title Suburban War Cry brings together two things that seem almost opposed. There’s the ordinary containment of suburbia and something loud, urgent and confrontational. What does “suburban” mean to you in these poems, and where does the war cry come from?

Suburban, or suburbia makes me think of somewhere leafy, uniformed, restful and quiet (until it’s not), where life could pass you by in a blink. When it comes to titles, I usually start a manuscript with several poems and then a combo of words (or word) just sticks and I follow that. The feeling I get from the title usually cements its way through the gaps, or at least in my head it does.

The collection opens with “1995,” where a Jack Russell pisses on a discarded Christmas tree as you are marched back to school, followed by the wonderfully dry “Thank you / for teaching me / all about symbolism.” Childhood memory appears throughout the book in similarly small, almost incidental images. What makes a detail survive long enough to become a poem?

That’s a great question. I’ve realised that I must have a bit of a photographic memory and I think certain things within a memory act like anchors to where I was and how I’d felt. When I wrote “1995” it was a similar time of the year and the streets were lined with dead Christmas trees. Decades on, I suddenly recalled that dog and how I’d also wanted to be that dog that morning, or just a dog in general. To add insult to injury, I can also remember how it’d felt like a lifetime until it’d be Christmas again, I can’t say that it does anymore.

Houses and versions of home recur throughout the collection: the boarded-up house, suburbia seen from the bus, the inherited bedsit, returning to your mum’s house in “Ennui.” Home rarely feels entirely secure or entirely bleak. Are you interested in home as a physical place, or more as something we continually reinterpret as we get older? How has your own idea of home changed over time?

It interests me as a physical place, but it can mean a million different things. I’ve lived in places that have been good and bad and one of which, I’m pretty sure was haunted. Home, for me should be a place where you can shut the door on the world for a while. The landlords of the last place I lived in were so crooked that they made the local papers - for whatever reason the block of flats were full of Brazilian uber eats drivers and their mopeds - the bike alarms would go off if even a breeze blew on them. People would kick off, smash the mopeds and then there would be more drama. There was also this strange Russian man that’d smear ketchup on people’s doors at night - it was his thing. The flats were cheap (at one point), central and were once owned by The Beatles, which is interesting.

The poems are full of ordinary things that suddenly acquire emotional or symbolic weight: a birthday card, a Christmas tree, fried yucas, a toilet cistern, peanut butter, a fortune cookie, a discarded plank. Do you tend to begin with the object and discover what it means, or does the idea come first and find its way into an object? How does that process usually work for you?

Well spotted. I write what I see, hear, taste, etcetera - sometimes the meaning is deliberate, other times the meaning just appears in the process of poetry painting.

There is a particular kind of humour running through the collection: the man inexplicably digging a hole, trying to repair a toilet because you are “a man,” summer eventually being told to “fuck off,” even the blank fortune-cookie message. The humour often arrives alongside anxiety, failure or mortality. What does comedy allow you to say that a more solemn poem might not?

It can offer more perspective. I can’t remember who originally said it, but tragedy plus time equals comedy. There’s some truth in that and it doesn’t always work out that way, but if you can laugh at something, or better still yourself, that negative energy loses a little control.

Masculinity appears in several different forms here: the absurd confidence of “Being a man, / I decided that I could fix it,” the silent man digging his hole, the anxiety of impending fatherhood, and men trying to make sense of work, ageing and failure. How consciously were you writing about masculinity, particularly the difficulty men sometimes have in expressing vulnerability directly?

Like arrogance, I’ve always found something hilarious in masculinity - in that instance it’s a conscious piss take, as it’s so ludicrous. I went to school and have unfortunately worked with a few men that will act that way, at least around other men. It’s all about respect and being taken very seriously, which doesn’t always sit well when you’ve got someone laughing in the background. The vulnerability aspect, I’ve found both sad and interesting. Men haven’t really been encouraged to show sensitivity, or vulnerability and in turn a lot of men will say that they don’t give a fuck what the world thinks, but unless you’re truly enlightened, it’s hard to buy and that’s okay because they feel vulnerable to admitting the truth and I can understand that to a degree. Look at the state of the world at the moment - the division, lack of understanding, hatred and constant misinformation, it’s enough to make anyone break down. I wear my heart on my sleeve, perhaps a little too much - someone could use that against me, but it could also help someone else feel like they’re less alone, or crazy. At the end of the day, the only way out is in. I strongly believe that.

Class seems present in the background of many of these poems without becoming an explicit argument: rehab on Jamaica Street, “middle-class failure / and a working-class / sore thumb,” fast food, buses, bedsits, and the “overpriced faux borough of London” Bristol has become. How important is class to the way you see the city and the people who inhabit these poems?

In a lot of countries your class is down to how much money you currently have in your bank account. In The UK, it’s more about things like entitlement, what you’re born into and us and them. I’ve got a friend, he’s a nice guy, but has to remind you that he’s middle-class a lot. He’s a barista, struggles to pay the rent and his flat’s owned by a builder, yet hates to admit that a builder makes more money than him. Who cares? That mirage of the middle-class feels like it’s gone. Bristol’s apparently the least affordable city in the UK and a lot of my friends have left for that reason. The Bristol I once knew still exists, but it’s dangling by a thread. Clearly, this was on my mind when I was writing these poems. This chapbook feels like it inhabits a place where the old city meets the new, like a tug of war across a huge puddle of overpriced coffee and discounted cider. I should also probably find something to write about other than Bristol.

In “AI.” someone tells you that artificial intelligence can write any poem “in seconds,” but your response is about the feeling of extracting something from yourself and releasing it without knowing where it will land. What role does that uncertainty, the act of making something, and the emotional relief of finishing play in what makes poetry meaningful to you?

I totally agree with that David Lynch metaphor of fishing to catching an idea. I have no real roadmap when I create, some do and there’s not a right or wrong way to it. But I’ll sit there and suddenly something tugs that line. It’s all your mind is focused on, everything else goes away and you’re completely somewhere else. Which is why it becomes addictive and why a block can sting over time. For the fisherman, it’s his purpose, he fishes. He’s not thinking of becoming the next Captain Birdseye, or probably questioning why he became a fisherman? For him it’s cathartic, a way to construct reality in a way that’s hard to explain to others. When he returns with a bag full of fish, he knows that he’s done his job.

Several poems are concerned with movement while also seeming fascinated by stasis: cycling beside the Avon, walking nowhere in particular, riding the bus back to suburbia, the man who only digs downwards, and the boredom of “Ennui.” What does movement represent in these poems? Is it a means of escape, a way of noticing where you already are, or something else entirely?

If you walk for long enough, you’ll end up in the same spot that you started, right? Throughout my twenties and early thirties, I moved from city, to city and then on to another country. I assured myself that I had my reasons, but I was just drifting about really, yet now when I think of how I could have wasted that time, I don’t regret it at all. Once the pandemic hit Spain, it was lockdown straight away and nobody knew what was going on. Somehow I managed to get out, unaware that the whole world was about to change and I was actually moving back home. I wouldn’t say that these poems come from a place that’s settled, but there’s a sense of settling in there, somewhere between nostalgia, compromise and reassurance.

The collection ends with “Drought” and “Ennui”: first an almost apocalyptic landscape where survival has replaced love, then a much smaller realisation that an apparently uneventful day at your mum’s house may one day become precious memory. That feels like a significant change of scale. What made “Ennui” feel like the right place to leave the reader?

If we’re lucky we’re born into a loving home, if we’re lucky again, we can carry that love elsewhere. My family here, have moved to other places, or have died. My mum’s the last leaf on that tree. I don’t know what the future holds, or where I’lll end up? But I’ve seen enough to have some fleeting gratitude for the present moment and to know that there was once somewhere that truly felt like home and perhaps that’s all we need? Like your question, that poem felt like the right place to end.

Suburban War Cry is available to pre-order now.

The chapbook is published in an edition of 26 copies, of which 20 are numbered for sale. 28 pages, 148 × 148 mm, saddle-stitched and numbered by hand. Interiors are printed on recycled 100gsm uncoated paper, with covers printed on 250gsm recycled natural stock.

Pre-orders include mini broadsides printed on neon pink and neon blue card, featuring cover artwork from Gwil’s previous Analog Submission Press chapbooks.

Launches 23 October.

Pre-order here →