Edmund Hardy / Namida Red is a writer and filmmaker of mixed Japanese-British heritage. He published a book of experimental philology, Complex Crosses (Contraband Books), in 2014, and writes regularly on politics and poetry for Jacobin magazine. He makes short films, most recently ‘A Field of Islands’ in 2020, which combine animation, documentary and dream-like narrative. Every Cruel Thing is his first collection of poetry.

‘After reading Edmund’s poetry, I see video-game skylines sinking into one great oceanic filing cabinet; I see friends making snow angels of history; I see cherry blossom petals whipping in the wind to form skeletons, the delicate furious dead all around us. Returning to the poems, I can’t find them now, or, they’ve left. It’s like each poem is a message from the past and from the future, paring in the currents but surviving to reach us, an echo that reaches out a hand against the tide’s pull.

Edmund writes from the interlocking regimes of hatred and violence within which we all live (differently), balancing a conditioning by pain with an inevitability of love. Every Cruel Thing has a boundless capacity for that love; this is poetry which breathes after the kiss (X) of that complex.’
—Nisha Ramayya

‘Hello, it’s been far too long!’
—Laurel Uziell