Join us on July 14th at The Old Toll Bar for a preview of Spoken Word at this year's PBH Free Fringe.
10 poets with solo shows at this year's Edinburgh Festival Fringe in August will be performing 10 minute tasters of their show.

Free Entry – you can donate at the end of the show with all proceeds split between the poets!

Included are:

Dean Tsang

Dean Tsang is a critically acclaimed spoken word poet based in Edinburgh. From soft dollops and light reflections to heart pounding arrhythmias and fierce flows, Our Anxious Measurements is a trilogy exploring anxiety as a wheel, as a search for answers and as a collective response. Over 40 different metrics work to bring laughter, calm, hope, anger, sadness and proof that anxiety is its own spectrum and not simply a weakness. Dean’s work has been featured twice in Loud Poet’s Best of Fringe series and has won the Bay Fringe Critics Choice Award.

Meron McCardle

What does it mean to be known? To know a person? To know a place? In this high-energy poetry show, Meron McCardle uses their move from Aotearoa, NZ to Scotland to explore ancestral connection to land, and the messiness of building a life as a queer, neuro-divergent 30 year old. Both irreverent and deeply earnest, expect to laugh and maybe cry.

Shannon O'Neill

Presented by author/rapper/theatremaker Shannon O’Neill (a.k.a. Persephonic), ‘Love Song for the Apocalypse’ is an exploration of love, societal transition, the indomitability of the human spirit, and the way hope perseveres even in the darkest of circumstances. Told from the perspective of a socially isolated shut-in, the story spans several years and a variety of environments – from the domestic, to the celestial, to the remnants of a previous universe – as a dwindling population struggles for survival across the cosmos. Unapologetically queer, except for the parts where she apologises for existing.

Spencer Mason

Spencer Mason is an award winning poet and multi-disciplinary storyteller based in Glasgow’s East End. Their epic poem, The Hundred Headed Song, is a satire of the modern Odyssey. After a poet attempts to kill himself, his soul rejected by hell for arriving too early, a young sailor embarks on a journey through the issues that plague contemporary society to deliver a message, one that might just bring him back to life…

India de Bono

India de Bono is an award winning writer and performer from London who has made their home in Glasgow. ‘For the Children of Circumstance’ is a solo poetry/storytelling show that weaves together their own life and fictional narratives in a brutally kind examination of queerness, disability and trauma through the lens of growing up Catholic with acts of radical acceptance and compassion. Are we truly sinners, or are we just the children of circumstance?

Stephen Durkan

On November 5th, 2014, Stephen Durkan wakes up from uneasy dreams and into the worst hangover he’s ever had. His life is in chaos, and he has problems, but he can’t remember exactly what they are. “One Day in the Life of Stephen Durkan” is an idiosyncratic one-man show that combines poetry, theatre, storytelling and music, and takes place over the course of one fateful day. It confronts the chaos of modern life and reflects it through a kaleidoscope of poetic and theatrical invention.