Todd’s poems are fuelled by a very specific type of experience – the motion and exploration provided by his former day job as a professional skateboarder. These energetic, rhythmic and staccato poems slip through New York, the Pacific coast, London and the north-west of England, capturing the thrill of movement and the precise joys of place.
Rebecca Tamás, The Guardian

Olly Todd’s debut collection, Out for Air, is one of acute angles and constant surprise. His is a somewhat degraded diction, at least in the sense of his rarely reaching for an ornately lyrical register; instead there is something brutalist, a language made of concrete and artful lighting. It’s rare to encounter a new poet whose work is absolutely unpredictable, from one line to the next, but Todd is capable of jarring shifts, refreshing coinages. [...] These are poems as atmosphere – rich in poise, and somewhat sui generis, blending modernist urges towards cataloguing the metropolis with something of Todd’s own.
Declan Ryan, The Poetry Review

Olly Todd makes rare, richly idiomatic music from the rubble of the pop metropolis. He approaches the built environment through drift and detour, finding hidden lines of desire and happenstance. When I read Todd’s poems I feel more a part of the world. This is a tender, transformative, elemental book.
Sam Buchan-Watts

Out for Air is an inventive and alluring debut, in which the early evening sun lights up the soaring, exhilarating miles of road and sky between the north of England and the USA. With shades of Kleinzahler and Eliot, these poems explore angles and movement, friendship and distance, in a voice that is graceful and genuinely original.
Martha Sprackland

Out for Air creates a world of familiarity gone strange, a world of signs of the human in motion, where the living in place becomes its constant study. It makes a hard-to-pin-down language which is all its own, and which mirrors its subjects’ international scope, its playful, sometimes arch, worldview, and which announces a wholly original voice.
Will Burns

Through Olly Todd’s words a whole world and potential opens up, a distillation of experience that feels universal and intimate.
Nick Jensen

I’m dazzled by this wonderful debut. Todd writes with a tangible physicality, solid as a curb, so that the language itself crunches, glides, grinds. A radically different way of experiencing the built and natural environment and an endlessly engaging, witty, serious and astute new voice.
Luke Kennard