Wife

2016 Forward Prize Winner for Best First Collection

The title of Wife is both ironic and deeply serious. There are wittily sharp poems on the gender inequalities and potential prisons of marriage, that are in dialogue with poems that celebrate the physical joys of intimacy and poems that explore the processes of self-creation that take place in the closeness to the male other. These spare, elegant poems are not only intensely body focused and attentive to the minutiae of domestic space, but that they make connections to the worlds of family, church, village and nation – and even, in a poem the references the parable of the wise and foolish virgins, to the soul.