Description
Book Synopsis**WINNER OF THE FORWARD PRIZE FOR BEST COLLECTION 2019**
**WINNER OF THE ROEHAMPTON PRIZE FOR BEST POETRY COLLECTION 2019**
Violence hangs over this book like an electric storm. Beginning with a poem about the teenage dawning of sexuality, Vertigo & Ghost pitches quickly into a long sequence of graphic, stunning pieces about Zeus as a serial rapist, for whom woman are prey and sex is weaponised. These are frank, brilliant, devastating poems of vulnerability and rage, and as Zeus is confronted with aggressions both personal and historical, his house comes crumbling down. A disturbing contemporary world is exposed, in which violent acts against women continue to be perpetrated on a daily – hourly – basis.
The book shifts, in its second half, to an intimate and lyrical document of depression and family life. It sounds out the complex and ambivalent terrain of early motherhood – its anxieties and claustrophobias as well as its gifts of tenderness and love – reclaiming the sanctuary of domestic private life, and the right to raise children in peace and safety.
Vertigo & Ghost is an important, necessary book, hugely impressive in its range and risk, and dramatic in its currency: a collection that speaks out with clarity, grace and bravery against the abuse of power.
**SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2020 RATHBONES FOLIO PRIZE**
**SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2019 T. S. ELIOT PRIZE**
‘Misogynistic violence, ancient myth and modern rage confront each other in moving and dynamic verse’ Financial Times
Trade ReviewVertigo & Ghost explodes into furious life with a series of poems and fragments about the Greek god Zeus... jagged, staccato
poems that shoot down the pages like lightning bolts...
an addictive, thrilling, sickening experience. * Guardian *
Vertigo & Ghost knocked the breath from me. Such furious, fierce, ecstatic poems, at once brutal and heartachingly tender;
I lay awake at night unable to stop thinking about them. Mothers and children, girls and women, their vulnerabilities and sorrows, fears amidst grave danger, their beautiful animal selves. Against a frightening darkness, these "sore jewels" radiate wild white-heat.
This
extraordinarily moving collection is a bold confrontation of violence against women.
Vertigo & Ghost is one of the darkest, bravest and most unsettling collections I have read in a while. * Observer *
An exceptional achievement. -- Paul Bailey * Literary Review *
[
A]
tour-de-force... [
Vertigo & Ghost] has generated a lot of (justified) buzz...
poems of lasting power. * Telegraph *Poetry Book of the Month* *
