Welcome Lonely Hearts is the fifth full collection of poetry by Exeter poet and novelist Andy Botterill, first published in 1994. It was five years in the making, collecting poems written from 1989 to 1994, when the author was working as a local news reporter in the South West of England, and the poet's first collection since his 1989 short pamphlet Coming to Terms. The poems are in a confessional style and have themes of love, loss, longing, break-up, contemporary history and social commentary. All the poems have been updated with revisions and additions for this new edition. Many appeared in their original format in independent poetry magazines, journals and anthologies both in the UK and America at the time of writing, including iFiring Squad, Memo/Route One, The Mexican Hat Dream, The New Truth, Omnific, Paris/Atlantic, Poetry Now, Purple Patch, Second Rapture and Sodem.
