Description
A daring first collection from an exciting young Irish poet, tackling how to live with the past and not be consumed by it. These poems explore the sense of powerlessness a young woman feels growing from childhood to adulthood in a predominantly Irish Catholic society. Restricted, she deems herself simultaneously too small and too big, an Alice in Wonderland. The poems develop an identity cobbled together with scraps from the Bible, snippets of film, favourite poems, the lives of the saints, and a kaleidoscope of memories, and track what emerges when that identity is not sturdy enough to sustain her. Faced with the loss of a loved one and the shock of her own mortality, a weight she has carried subconsciously since childhood, her fragile façade shatters at her feet like porcelain.