WINNER of the 2023 Books Are My Bag Readers Award for Best Poetry Collection\n\nAll moggy moxie, Pedersen croons to the beauty and devastation of love, loss, friendship, cats and careless joy. Equal parts tender and trenchant, raw and ribald, plangent and smutty, these poems exhibit an emotionally charged, fantastical playground of language and lore.\n\nFrom the brutalising death of a cherished friend comes a gut-wrenching grief. And so begins a tenacious quest for light, lustre and survival as Pedersen pays tender tribute to a gorgeous, life-altering friendship. In doing so, he harks back to the hilarity of being young, reckless and petrified: memories of boys showboating in a fishing tackle shop, games of feline metamorphosis, laments for demolished buildings and a case of constipation of the most pernicious stock.\n\nAs frisky as it is fierce, The Cat Prince pounces around the poet's emotional and physical landscapes, past and present, unfankling a Scotland full of gothic splendour and nature's majesty.\n\nThese poems reveal a poet at his bravest and most vulnerable. The Cat Prince & Other Poems purrs with affection, flashes its teeth, then digs in the claws.