Adam Barrett's The First Thirty Years EP is a taut, propulsive collection that fuses poetic memoir with political indictment, navigating masculinity, class, and grief through the lens of North East England. Structured like a concept album, the poems track a coming-of-age amidst institutional neglect, inherited violence, and economic precarity. Barrett writes with formal agility and emotional charge, drawing lines between private collapse and public failure without sacrificing lyrical control. The result is a work of cultural reckoning, where place and politics are inseparable from the body, and memory is an act of resistance.