Ritual and Adolescence in Lucie McKnight Hardy’s ‘Water Shall Refuse Them’, Dead Ink, (2019)

‘Robin’s egg, magpie’s egg, duckling bill and bone. Blackbird’s egg, feathers of wren, the skull of a crow.’ p.256 Lucie McKnight Hardy’s 'Water Shall Refuse Them', when it was published by Dead Ink last year, had such a profound personal impact on me because it pairs themes of ritual and photography during adolescence with the …

Long Essay: Lines of Desire

Maggie Nelson’s cerebral study of the colour blue uses science and philosophy to explore facets of loss, pain and pleasure. A friend’s paralysis caused by an accident and the end of a highly chemical sexual relationship are articulated via the colour blue. Bluets is as much a poetic manual for emotional literacy as it is …

The Crying Book by Heather Christle

Heather Christle’s The Crying Book is a conversation on crying and the biological phenomenon of shedding tears. Christle's earthing poetry maps out the places she has cried, and in doing so, makes constellations between science, philosophy and emotional intelligence with an intimacy that urges readers to cry and to do it hard. I admit to …

Saltwater by Jessica Andrews

  I read Jessica Andrew’s Saltwater at a time when space needed filling. Karmic timing’s rare with reading but this novel's themes of solitude, loss and identity so echoed my own experiences that it felt sacred. I was heading East Coast for a week to find ghosts but I found lacunae instead. My plan was …

Surfacing by Annest Gwilym

Surfacing is an immersive debut collection with all the movement of water. Gwilym’s sights are firmly set on buoyancy and the swing of the tides in this swimmy triptych of poems which give compelling voice to the black dog.  Gwilym traverses the three stages of mental health crisis from deterioration to disequilibrium and a slow …

DTR by Annabel Banks (Broken Sleep Books)

  DTR is an acronym for ‘define the relationship’, a crucial question one asks the other early on in dating, and usually by text or direct message. This title serves as the scaffold for Banks’s emphatic collection which exposes the uneasy truths within our structured realities. These are poems that switch between cyber space to back …

Book Review: A Witness of Waxwings by Alison Lock

  Alison Lock’s A Witness of Waxwings is a tantalising collection concerned with metamorphosis and reminiscence. Age, retrospection and transformation emerge time and again in these brief narratives which spool imaginatively across time and place, frequently shapeshifting in form. Selkies and ghosts spook the pages, there are fast-forwarding clocks and masked villagers, there are ancient children, houses choking …

& by Amy Kinsman, Published by Indigo Dreams

This debut collection is concerned with wanting and journeys of desire are curated with intimacy and aptitude. Moments of choice are given a retrospective lens. Forks in the road where on the one hand this might have happened, on the other that, human decisions made as a matter of course are plainly visible; their outcomes, …

The Cartography of Others by Catherine McNamara

Catherine McNamara’s The Cartography of Others is a collection which maps out the geographies of relationships and far-flung locations with acumen and grace. These short stories are eclectic in form with a broad range of themes but each feels elastic with movement, transporting us to contemporary London, Ghana, Hong Kong and along the jagged peaks …

Strange Fashion by Pam Thompson, Pindrop Press (2017)

Pam Thompson’s Strange Fashion sightsees history and place in this stunning cartographic collection. With Thompson as guide, poetic map-making takes readers on a tour of Leicester, Canary Wharf and far beyond and travels the distance of the Highlands to the swollen banks of the Mississippi. One of the most striking features of these poems - which have extraordinary range …