Feral - Softcover

Kate Potts

Softcover

ISBN 10: 178037416X ISBN 13: 9781780374161

Publisher: Bloodaxe Books Ltd, 2018

These 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 is a Poetry Book Society Recommendation.

'Intricate, vital-tender, dazzling work - Potts' poetry sings even as it bares its teeth.'' - Eley Williams on Feral

Review:

It has taken Potts seven years to write this follow-up to her debut Pure Hustle. It's been worth the wait. Feral is musical, joyously weird and filled with moments of pure pleasure... --Tristram Fane Saunders, The Telegraph (Poetry Book of the Month)

'Kate Potts's i>Feral is a revelation of beauty, precision and force' - Kate Wakeling, Morning Star (Poetry Books of the Year 2018)

'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

Feral 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, on Feral

About the Author:

Kate Potts is a London-based poet, academic and editor. She is a visiting lecturer at Middlesex University and Royal Holloway, and a tutor at The Poetry School. She completed a practice-based PhD on the poetic radio play in 2017. Her pamphlet Whichever Music (tall-lighthouse) was a Poetry Book Society Pamphlet Choice in 2008 and was shortlisted for a Michael Marks Award. Her first book-length collection, Pure Hustle, was published by Bloodaxe in 2011. Her second collection, Feral(Bloodaxe Books, 2018), is a Poetry Book Society Recommendation. Kate is co-director of Somewhere in Particular, a site-specific poetry organisation which aims to connect poetry performance to specific places and communities and to reach beyond conventional audiences.

• Publisher: Bloodaxe Books Ltd
• Publication date: 2018
• ISBN 10: 178037416X
• ISBN 13: 9781780374161
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 80