Gub is a poetry collection built out of mouths, insults, folklore, local speech, myth, booze, violence, weather, fathers, gods and animals.

The title itself does a lot of set up. In Scots/Northern Irish usage, “gub” means the mouth, but also to hit someone in the mouth, or to beat them badly — so the book is already sitting inside speech as both sound and wound. Poetry: apparently the ancient technology of getting punched by language.

McKendry’s poems move through Belfast, rural memory, pub talk, family myth, and a vernacular world where language is never cleanly decorative. It bites, mutates, repeats, sings, spits. The collection has that good contemporary poetry thing where it feels formally alert without being bloodlessly clever: weird enough to catch the theory goblin, grounded enough that it still smells like rain, tarmac, smoke, and somebody’s bad Friday afternoon.

Paperback, Corsair, 2024; number line indicates first printing. Good second-hand condition with light shelf wear only.