Coin Laundry at Midnight

2024 Button Poetry Chapbook Contest Runner-Up and Winner of The Northern Writers’ Debut Poetry Award, Carson Wolfe’s Coin Laundry at Midnight is an unfolding highway through gendered violence and queer becoming.

Seasoned with fresh and intricate language, Wolfe’s work roams the open road in search of the self—uncovering identity in the aftermath of teen parenthood and urban poverty. A British voice wanderlust in America, this gripping chapbook challenges the male road trip narrative, going so far as to resurrect Jack Kerouac, who appears within these pages to minimise the dangers of sex work and speculate about lesbians.

A painting of truck headlights and motel parking lots, Coin Laundry at Midnight questions what it means to move through a world that is continuously reinforced as unsafe for women and girls.

These poems are fiercely intelligent, radical, sexy and funny. Carson Wolfe is an exciting new talent to read now and watch out for in the future.

– Carol Ann Duffy

Wolfe interfaces with—and critiques—American poets of God-like status in the cannon of poetry, challenging what’s important in the dossiers of cis men. This collection is for all of us who reject that shit.

– Juniper Fitzgerald, How Mamas Love Their Babies