Mate Arias is Lewis Buxtons love song to his friends, a soaring voice attempting to communicate in a masculine world often punctuated by silence or violence. Muscles are torn, crossword clues are pondered, and pints are lifted as the poet attempts to make sense of his friends and himself, and their often clumsy, physical dances around each other.
Under the glares of floodlights and movie screens, with a backdrop of superheroes and zombies, Buxton creates the settings for new versions of male friendships. A poignant and funny exploration of making and maintaining relationships as lives begin to move in different directions, Mate Arias is a unique celebration of the tenderness and love that can be communicated by men.
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Lewis Buxton has played an absolute blinder with Mate Arias... Become friends with these poems. Your life will thank you. - Rishi Dastidar
Lewis Buxtons work has appeared in The Poetry Review, The Rialto and The Independent and won the Winchester Poetry Prize (2020). His debut collection, Boy in Various Poses, was published by Nine Arches Press in 2021, followed by Mate Arias, published by The Emma Press in 2025. He regularly visits schools, delivering workshops and performances to young people, and his theatre shows tour extensively in the UK. He lives in Norfolk. Artist-printmaker Mark Andrew Webber specialises in painstakingly-researched typographic and geometric projects, including his Where in the World series of enormous city maps and FORM, a six-part study of line and form. In 2007, Webber was awarded a Silver Cube award from the Art Directors Club of New York. His first solo exhibition, Wonderlust, was on display at the Londonewcastle Project Space in London in 2014. He collaborated with poet Jacqueline Saphra on her pamphlet If I Lay on my Back I Saw Nothing but Naked Women (Emma Press, 2014), illustrating her poems with linocuts inspired by his lifedrawing sketches. He is based in Reading.
