2020-2021

I have a new poetry collection (Mortar) out in a week or two, so it seemed a good time to round up what’s been going on and finally update my home page.

2020 saw my novel Distant Hills achieve publication and also my latest KFS pamphlet YIELD entered the world.

Here’s what some very kind people have said about Mortar:

‘Regardless of how many times I have read these poems, they never cease to surprise me. Mortar is a remarkable collection attuned to the various structures – both jubilant and woeful – that order life. The poems place the abstract with the concrete, the cerebral with the physical, with invigorating, carefully-pegged precision: ‘The uncut grass of never asking knots and knots until severance is the only uncalled-for answer.’ If these poems were glasses, I would wear them often, to see the world with more curiosity, immediacy, and intensity.’
—Lila Matsumoto

‘Unsworth has built a memorable collection in Mortar. We are thrown into a variation of tightly fisted prose poems which loosen into a confident dance of poetic forms. “My nothingness is manmade” – and indeed the poems make use of architecture and psychology to create a quiet, unnerving intimacy within a domestic space haunted by vivid images and memories. Through a forceful first-person voice, the book investigates the multiple layering of the self, the body, and their vulnerabilities’ – Kit Fan

‘In the essay “Slow Death”, Lauren Berlant considers that “agency can be an activity of maintenance, not making”, to withstand unequal infrastructures set up to dominate and corrode. Lydia Unsworth’s collection Mortar is about as radical a poetics of maintenance as I can think of. It tunes its attention to materials, structures, and forms of getting by as well as the incursions that make so frequently such a task: Bakelite, dangling sofas on cranes, baths falling through ceilings, moulding bicycle seats, bus shelter overhangs, shrink wrap, and sun tanned hands. Unsworth’s poems wrap and envelop, touch and lean, shelter and protect. I don’t ever want to leave the stunning language structures of this book which is just as well because the five mattresses by the door would make it quite a squeeze.’ – Colin Herd

‘The mortar of bodies, relationships (emotional and economic) and domestic spaces binds these extraordinary poems’ diverse materials into a pleasingly unsettling whole.’ – James Knight

And the links to buy all these things, should you want to, are here:

Mortar

YIELD

Distant Hills

Thanks for your support.

Spring–Autumn 2018

 

This year has seen the publication of my first two collections: Certain Manoeuvres (Knives Forks and Spoons Press) in April, and, after winning the 2018 Erbacce Poetry Prize earlier this year, Nostalgia for Bodies, which is currently at the printers.

Here’s to the third!

 

Erbacce 2018 Poetry Prize

Great news – I just won it!

Here’s a link to the evidence and two columns of longlist entrants.

I am honoured to have been chosen and look forward to my second collection coming out soon.

spin-off series

For more regularly-updated, more conventional blog-like movements try me here:

akindofpsychogeography.wordpress.com

An experiment in progress. Sort of about body, sort of about memory, sort of about negotiating space.