Cafés

by Holly Pester

The highly anticipated second poetry book by one of the UK's most innovative poets, following the Forward Prize shortlisted Comic Timing.A utopian, stylish and completely unique anti-epic long poem that moves through the history of the café space, exploring workers' rights, foodie culture, the importance of the third space and bohemian and artistic histories.A contribution to the growing body of contemporary literature around food and restaurant culture, for readers of Vittles, Ruby Tandoh, Rebecca May Johnson, and readers of caffs not Gunslinger by Ed Dorn, Fourth Person Singular by Nuar Alsadir, How to Wash a Heart by Bhanu Kapil.

Genres: Poetry

125 pages, Paperback

Published July 2, 2026

Reviews

[Faath · Rating 4 out of 5]

I bought this book earlier in Antwerp with the intention to write short stories and the background conversations I catch in the cafés I sit in.

I've always enjoyed sitting at places alone. My favourite memory is one in Berlin where I was watching people pass by. Drinking my warm cup of tea while people were walking in the cold. I honestly should do it more often. Find my favourite café and just sit and write.

Some lines were beautifully written. Some needed another read to understand. I'll bring this book with me, to guide me a little, until I know how to capture people's thoughts in a cup of tea.

[Matt McMatt · Rating 4 out of 5]

I am not a massive reader of contemporary poetry (being much more traditional and conventional in my poetic tastes). So I started this book with some trepidation.
However I am pleased to say that I actually really enjoyed it. Getting the rhythm and timbre of the language took some time, and finding what i take to be the voice of the poet was a task in the early parts. But at some point I found it all clicking.
Some pieces are better than others of course, but the ones that land REALLY landed emotionally for me.
I would definitely recommend this book, as a new experience if nothing else, I am excited to check out Holly Pester's other works, as well as look at more contemporary poetry from now on.

[Juliano · Rating 5 out of 5]

“Anyone who has ever entered a café has wondered: what are we acknowledging here? Whether in bohemia or on a street corner, the café wants us to consider things lightly. A good café focuses our attention away from the work it produces. It confuses our work with leisure. Now we're sore, let's reflect on our damaged life. Each café is civilisation's averted conclusion. A powerless little proxy confuses me. […] Today is a life and I find myself in the middle of a busy café. We're in a book called Mankind with its tinkling, bloodcurdling doors. We're entering into a pact. This may become strained.” So begins Holly Pester’s latest poetry collection, Cafés, an “anti-epic poem” and “satirical search for utopias” that feels perhaps more of a successor to her exceptional novel The Lodgers than her previous poetry collection Comic Timing. Here the multiplicity of the café space is stretched into a wildly enjoyable lyrical infinity, with prose poems/fragments unfolding an array of vignettes and visions of what the café is and who might be in there: “The café is a democracy of sinners, no?” “Imagine sitting at a table in a café waiting for the love of your life to arrive but instead of them, in walks their lover. […] Lovers are estranged from sensible enjoyment in the café. We are always someone else's wife and our love is always elsewhere.” “In my café there is silence and screaming and all sorts of transfers. Café owners are capable of terrible things. Go on, prepare your weirdest belief systems, this is what you wanted.” This is a politically minded and formally inventive world in which a business plan is a “medieval dream vision”, in which “We design a time-based language”, in which we can “deduct time from image” and “see into a memory”. Pester’s craft, funny and philosophical, does what literature most needs to do right now, to show us both how we are living and how we might live instead. Ultimately and always, “The café continues around us.” Cafés will be in the world on 2 July from Fitzcarraldo — thanks again to Clare for another stellar proof!

[S P · Rating 3 out of 5]

Prologue
I have been studying cafés.

So have all of us. Anyone who has ever entered a café has wondered: what are we acknowledging? Whether in bohemia or on a street corner, the café wants us to consider things lightly. A good café focuses our attention away from the work produced. It confuses work with leisure. Now we're sore, let's reflect on our damaged life. Each café is civilisation's averted conclusion. A powerless little proxy confuses me. Put it this way, sometimes I feel gargantuan, always powerless, made of public, like I'm all of it, before and after. Then I realize I'm yelling. Shrink to enter a swell. I get why there's steam in my face, or is that the Enlightenment? Shock quickens. One customer turns to another and says, you've become lost inside your head.

Today is a life and I find myself in the middle of a busy café. We're in a book called Mankind with its tinkling, bloodcurdling doors. This may become strained. (15)

from Worker's Café
My business plan? It's a medieval dream vision. (25)

from A Café for Lovers
There was an end to the sentence where time passed and took me with it [...] My life is trying to make cafés in the middle of her sentences. (50)

from Friends, Including the Childless
Will there always be a mute airlock inside me? Is my happiness a circus dove to be hunted? O is this funny? Will every day be a drill for the following half sleep? (83)

[Christopher Walthorne · Rating 1 out of 5]

I’ve worked in several cafés over the years. Sometimes it’s a quiet and cushy job, but a lot of times it’s busy, stressful, and mostly thankless work. None of this experience is reflected in Pester’s poetry; it is instead written from the perspective of an observer, a pretentious dreamer jumbling words together that may occasionally sound pretty but say nothing of substance and value. I’ll bet good money that Pester has never actually worked a single day in a café, because if she had, she might find something more meaningful to say about the people who work underpaid jobs to churn out the oat matcha lattés and avocado toasts for rude, stuck-up customers, rather than the empty poetic musings of an oblivious writer fiddling away at a pointless pile of words. This is poetry for the cushy middle class. It is certainly not for the people who serve them.

[Colin · Rating 3 out of 5]

I have a penchant for books that are part prose and part poetry, and have lots of white space. This is one of those books.

There are some good themes and imagery in the book, along with some slightly pretentious writing and occasionally lines that required a re-read because they were a little jumbled.

[Timothy · Rating 4 out of 5]

4/5

[Katerina🤍 · Rating 3 out of 5]

‘Where are you going? Don’t you want my fragile offering?’