Many Red Fish is a kind of absurd diary, a contemplation of the world out there and the world in here, produced through a mixing of word association, montage techniques and strange juxtapositions. Extreme weather, food – whether gathered from bins or prepared in restaurants – art, the city and the country, music, colour and the human body are all subjects which are brought together and reconsidered in this new collection. There are also a few fish and some of these may indeed be red.  
 
 
‘Spence’s pirate poetics combine the best of nautical history with some freely plundered contemporary processes to produce gold aplenty. This is real treasure: X marks the spot’ – Rupert Loydell on A Curious Shipwreck (Shearsman, 2010), shortlisted for the Forward Prize best debut collection.
 
‘Steve Spence presents short prose poems that splinter and fragment before your eyes and ears’ – Ian MacMillan speaking about Limits of Control (Penned in the Margins, 2011) on BBC Radio 3’s The Verb.
 
‘Subtly prismatic, these fractured images float joyously free from the whorl on the page’ – Peter Gillies on Maelstrom Origami (Shearsman, 2014), Stride magazine.