Books / Crash Centre

Book cover for Crash Centre by David McLoghlin

Crash Centre

“Each poem feels like a shard of broken glass, sharp, reflective, impossible to ignore…”
—Books for Breakfast Podcast

“The sheer force of McLoghlin’s language, his imagination’s radically steep incline in the face of awful experience, is what makes his poetry exceptional and redemptive.…”
—Thomas McCarthy, The Irish Catholic

“One of the most important book of poetry published in Ireland this year.”
—Patrick Cotter, author of Sonic White Poise

Crash Centre explores what happens when grooming, gaslighting and abuse masquerade as trust in the relationship between the author and a charismatic literary monk—an antagonist who unites the more toxic legacies of the Catholic Church and Northern-Irish Republicanism. Set at an elite boarding school in the early 1990s, this powerful, affecting work addresses questions of mentorship and betrayal, trauma, memory and erasure, as well as pathways to recovery.