Browse our Bookshelves, selected annually by the Exchange as a window to recent Welsh literary works which we recommend for translation.
“Abigail Parry follows her flamboyant debut in Jinx with yet more pyrotechnics as she sets out to investigate the nature of intimacy. Each poem is a freshly conceived and high-spirited assault, outwitting the reader’s expectations in pursuit of uncomfortable home truths.”
Christopher Reid, Sunday Independent
Shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize 2023
Shortlisted for English-language Poetry Award, Wales Book of the Year 2024
A bold and far-ranging second collection from a fresh, original new voice in poetry.
I Think We’re Alone Now was supposed to be a book about intimacy: what it might look like in solitude, in partnership, and in terms of collective responsibility. Instead, the poems are preoccupied with pop music, etymology, surveillance equipment and cervical examination, church architecture and beetles. Just about anything, in fact, except what intimacy is or looks like.
So this is a book that runs on failure, and also a book about failures: of language to do what we want, of connection to be meaningful or mutual, and of the analytic approach to say anything useful about what we are to one another. Here are abrupt estrangements and errors of translation, frustrations and ellipses, failed investigations. And beetles.
Bloodaxe Books (2023) | 978-1780376813
80pp
Suzanne Fairless-Aitken, Rights Manager: rights@bloodaxebooks.com
“Abigail Parry follows her flamboyant debut in Jinx with yet more pyrotechnics as she sets out to investigate the nature of intimacy. Each poem is a freshly conceived and high-spirited assault, outwitting the reader’s expectations in pursuit of uncomfortable home truths.”
Christopher Reid, Sunday Independent