Holly Pester discusses her new poetry collection Cafés, which reimagines the coffee-scented caf as a realm of fantasy, freedom and ritual

Grab a chair and sink into Cafés, a set of poetic vignettes that sketch and stretch the dimensions of the everyday café, your favourite transactional comfort zone. In Holly Pester's hands, the café is reshaped again and again as a space of possibility and pressure, of politics and leisure, of the familiar and the uncanny, or simply somewhere to drink, dream and dwell for a while.

Holly Pester is an author, poet and a lecturer in the department of Literature, Film and Theatre Studies at the University of Essex. Her collection of poetry, Comic Timing, and her novel, The Lodgers, were both published by Granta, while Cafés is out now via Fitzcarraldo Editions. She'll be chatting all-things Cafés with Margate-based writer, reviewer, editor and dramaturg Juliano Zaffino, whose excellent debut novel The Steps came out earlier this year.

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