Suburban War Cry by Gwil James Thomas

About the book

Suburban War Cry gathers poems of memory, home, class, masculinity, movement, boredom, anxiety, and the comedy of ordinary life. Gwil writes through boarded-up houses, buses, bedsits, dead Christmas trees, toilet cisterns, peanut butter, fortune cookies, fried yucas, and walks that lead nowhere in particular. Bristol sits somewhere behind it all: part home, part memory, part city under pressure.

These poems contain nostalgia and unease, movement and stasis, the absurd and the sincere. The ordinary gives way to something larger: a broken toilet becomes a measure of time, a childhood dog becomes an emblem of freedom, and an uneventful morning at home becomes something that may one day be impossible to recover.

Edition details

• Catalogue: ASP 007
• Published: 23 October 2026
• Edition: 26 copies
• Copies for sale: 20, numbered by hand
• Format: Small square, 148 × 148 mm
• Extent: 28 pages
• Binding: Saddle-stitched
• Interior: 100 gsm recycled uncoated paper
• Cover: 250 gsm recycled natural stock
• Production: Designed, printed, assembled, and numbered by Analog Submission Press in York

About the author

Gwil James Thomas is a poet, novelist and inept musician. He lives in his hometown of Bristol, England, but has also lived in London, Brighton and Spain. He is the author of over twenty poetry chapbooks, most recently Mercy (Two Key Customs) and Accumulated, a split with poet William Barker (Crying Heart Press). A spoken-word and musical collaboration based on poems from his second poetry collection, The P45 Power Ballad (Yellow King Press), is forthcoming from Bristol record label Irregular Patterns. He is part English, part Welsh and part wolf.

Suburban War Cry is Thomas’s third solo chapbook with Analog Submission Press, following Hidden Icons & Secret Menus (2018) and Cocoon Transitions (2020). He also appeared alongside John D. Robinson in the 2018 split chapbook Romance, Renegades & Riots.

The Small Run

A new conversation with Gwil James Thomas about Suburban War Cry will be published in The Small Run on 15 October. Thomas talks about suburbia, childhood memory, home, humour, masculinity, class, Bristol, artificial intelligence, movement, and the uncertain process of turning experience into poems.

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