Michael Naghten Shanks

Glee of the squeeze

Michael Naghten Shanks is a Poetry Ireland Rising Generation poet. He is author of two pamphlets of poems: Year of the Ingénue and The Architecture of Red Caviar Sandwiches. Winner of Listowel Writers’ Week Poetry Collection Award 2025, he was shortlisted twice for Poem of the Year at the Irish Book Awards and has had multiple poems longlisted for the National Poetry Competition and The London Magazine Poetry Prize. He is the recipient of Arts Council Literature Bursary and Agility awards. Recent poems have appeared in And Other Poems, Propel Magazine, Basket Magazine, and Banshee. 

Michael said this about his poem:

“Glee of the Squeeze” began with the comic absurdity of being crammed into a lift, that awkward moment when discomfort tips into shared joy. I was interested in exaggerating it until the scene became something stranger—part office game, part ritual, with a warmth that is also edged by mischief. What fascinated me most was how easily intimacy can turn to exclusion: the laughter that feels communal until someone is left on the outside. The poem plays with that blur, where glee and cruelty, silliness and loneliness, exist in the same breath, making us shake with laughter—or unease. The poem’s narrow, vertical shape is deliberate, echoing the lift itself, a confined space where intimacy and cruelty press against each other.