Coffee With Cayetano *** pre order ***

Publication date 26th November '26

In Coffee with Cayetano Lydia Towsey encounters the ghost of her unlikely ancestor, Cayetano Romero — Mexican Ambassador to Washington DC and the Court of St. James, keen amateur astronomer, and her grandfather's grandfather. Across a year of encounters, the poems in Coffee with Cayetano move through imagined conversations and sudden visitations; through monologues spoken by the overlooked women in the margins, through kitchens and courtrooms, buses and borderlands. Over four generations — in accents, silences and departures.

Coffee with Cayetano asks what it means to come from somewhere — and to find yourself arriving elsewhere. How do we carry the ones who made us? How do we live inside stories that began before we did? How do we continue — radiant with inheritance, crowded with ghosts, remade by love — when what we have lost is also what we are made of?

Lydia Towsey is an NHS worker, mother of two, cat-fancier and daughter of a bus driver and a nurse. Twice shortlisted for the Bridport Poetry Prize, Lydia has an MA in Creative Writing, and is a self-taught ukuleleist in the genre of Les Dawson. She is of mixed English, Welsh, Hungarian and Mexican heritage and uses poetry and performance to explore such diverse themes as culture, migration, class, gender, and ecology. Lydia is the CEO of WORD!, a poetry organisation uniquely co-produced by an NHS Trust and delivering one of the longest running poetry nights in the UK. She is the Community Lead for BrightSparks CIO and the Founder and Co-Director of Leicestershire Partnership NHS Trust's Arts in Mental Health Service.

She writes for a generation that must find a way. One of the new intriguing voices of her time.’
~ Jean Binta Breeze