Poetry Space Prize Winner, 2025
ISBN: 978-1-909404-60-1 £5
This was the undisputed and outstanding winner. A superb sequence of poems, utterly brilliant in their conception and delivery. Original, varied in style, yet all of a piece and beautifully sustained and unified in their underlying vision, voice and imagination. I would be very proud to have written this.
The poems take the figure of Alice in Wonderland, and borrow from that work some of its well-known scenes and idioms, but with a unique slant of using this as a lens for filtering personal and often fractured female experience. I only realised at the end that there is no first person (a welcome relief after the fashion for so much confessional poetry), yet the 3rd person feels very revealing, and the use of pronouns has clearly been deeply considered (the poem starting ‘Along the way the I that was me turned italic’ is a brilliant example of this.)
The rich metaphors are surreal and astonishing throughout, visually rich and always apt; nothing feels contrived; the opening out onto wide female issues gives it a subtle feminist handle; the use of Paula Rego’s art in some of the poems (ekphrastic poems with a difference) as a source of imagery, perspective and inspiration is a perfect mirror for the poet’s own way of seeing, taking it deeper and further. There is ample passion, humour, wit, craft, imagination, here and some startling, disturbing, thought-provoking angles onto things. I absolutely loved and admired this sequence, and can’t wait to see it published and have it on my shelves.
Rosie Jackson, judge