John Agard has been broadening the canvas of British poetry for the past 40 years with his mischievous, satirical fables which overturn all our expectations. In his eighth Bloodaxe collection we enter a world of play and parable - in which the little green man stands for all pesky outsiders - in provocative poems charged with contemporary resonance.

Which box should the little green man tick on the question of identity? Will the little green man survive as a minority of one in a multiracial London? What if the little green man volunteers to give blood to 21st-century humankind?

Winner of the Queen's Gold Medal, the Caribbean-British poet brings to bear his trademark trickster wit that bridges the metaphysical and the political, the comic and the poignant, the oral and the literary.

In the year when we learnt of the damage and cruelty that the UK's hostile-environment policies inflicted on the Windrush generation, John Agard strikes back with these cleverly crafted parables of an outsider. The little green man's encounters and observations, his mix of wonder and wise caution, are given a voice that manages to be both naïve and incisive. --Maria Crawford, Financial Times (Poetry Books of 2018)

'Through the figure of the alien, Agard is able to retell, in an original and uncanny manner, the now familiar stories of migrants arriving, and striving to assimilate, in Britain... The Coming of the Little Green Man makes a poignant contribution to current discussions of migration and 'foreigners', and makes an insistent call for a shift away from isolationism to a more inclusive and harmonious humanity.' - Sarala Estruch, Times Literary Supplement