Description
Book SynopsisThese poems are luminous despatches from the charged, porous boundary between ‘animal’ and ‘human’. They pull apart and remake definitions and categorisations of wildness and civilisation, training their focus on the language we use to describe youth, social class, and the body. From iron horses to grizzly bears, from deep-water fish to scanderoons, Feral roams the limits of power, language, and love. Cinematic, playful, edgy, tender, startlingly imaginative and strange, Feral’s voices carve out a space in the borderlands. Kate Potts' Whichever Music was a Poetry Book Society Pamphlet Choice in 2008 and shortlisted for a Michael Marks Award. Her first book-length collection, Pure Hustle, was published by Bloodaxe in 2011. Feral is her second collection and a Poetry Book Society Recommendation.
Trade ReviewFeral is a storehouse of manifold enchantments: a book in which lore and personal iconography are melded to startling effect. The technical assurance displayed here alongside a strong beating heart make for a sonically and emotionally rich reading, and re-reading, experience. This collection is “a feat of balance”, as the poem “Iron Horse” has it, where each component gives shape and function to the elegant motion of the whole. -- Kayo Chingonyi
Intricate, vital-tender, dazzling work — Potts’ poetry sings even as it bares its teeth. -- Eley Williams * on Feral *
These are poems of a marvellously observed, bodily interiority which engage with our animal selves, at a loss in the concrete warrens of our cities, as they starve or gorge, roam or home. The resulting book is deeply personal, compelling, occasionally hilarious and frequently unsettling as the “strange fish” of our thoughts emerge from their “iron guardedness” and hitch themselves to the amazing railings of these poems. And the radio poem The Blown Definitions is a wonder, a whole island mythos to itself. Kate Potts is one of the foremost writers of our generation. Buy this monstrously brilliant book. -- Fiona Benson * on Feral *
