Finding Magic in the Void: Poems About Love, Grief, Family and Modern Life

by JOHN TOGHER

In this darkly comic and tender collection, John Togher explores the strange machinery of being love affairs that flicker like jazz in backstreet bars, fathers who remain in the hum of kitchens, children who turn chaos into wonder, and lonely people reaching for meaning in a world that documents everything but understands very little.

Moving between surreal humour, bruised confession, social observation, grief, lust, and quiet domestic beauty, these poems find the extraordinary in the a chipped tooth at Piccadilly, a phone call erased like dusk, rain-soaked streets in Prague, a man salting cucumbers, a child naming a snail Captain, and a whole generation wading deeper into the blue light.

Restless, intimate, and at times uncomfortable, this is a collection about the search for connection in the void, and the small moments of magic that keep us from disappearing.

83 pages, Kindle Edition

Published July 20, 2026

About the author

John Togher is a Wigan-based writer whose fiction blends folk horror, coastal mystery and psychological unease as explored in debut novella, Bound by the Salt, set in the strange village of Cairnshore. John’s writing explores obsession, memory, and the strange pull of places we thought we had escaped.