"In Much With Body I wanted to experiment with how to write about living with chronic illness and daily, continual pain. Pain is a co-tenant of a shared ecosystem in this book, in the same way as frogs, owls and deer are. It asks how we can live alongside each other better.
It begins with a poem – ‘Full Wolf Moon’ – written in January 2020. It is a poem of anticipatory anxiety for the year, spreading from the erasure of the lunar eclipse by a storm. I felt something bad was coming. It was not what I feared. It rarely is. I often think my poems know things before I do; about myself, about the world. Like dreams, they are translating signs I can’t yet interpret with my mundane waking mind"
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