Apricot E-Book

Katie O'Pray

• Herausgeber: Out-Spoken Press
• Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022

Seitenzahl: 26

Beschreibung

Apricot is a devastating debut from one of the UK's brightest and most fascinating poets, written with the urgency of someone who knows they might not make it through the weekend. Katie O'Pray's is a highly articulate poetics, kicking against the language of convention that would seek to limit us. The improvisational vocabulary at play here engenders both a developed identity and a young identity continuously being made, as each section of the book subverts the questions of mental health practitioners with wisdom and panache. These poems do not just concern the violence of gender, of sexuality, of disability, of addiction, they reinvigorate how these violences can be understood. This is a collection of singular quality.

Leseprobe

Published by Out-Spoken Press,

Unit 39, Containerville

1 Emma Street

London, E2 9FP

All rights reserved

© Katie O’Pray

The rights of Katie O’Pray to be identified as the author of this work have been asserted by them in accordance with section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

A CIP record for this title is available from the British Library.

This book is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Out-Spoken Press.

First edition published 2022

ISBN: 978-1-7399021-0-0

ePub ISBN: 978-1-7399021-1-7

Typeset in Adobe Caslon

Design by Patricia Ferguson

Printed and bound by Print Resources

Out-Spoken Press is supported using public funding by the National Lottery through Arts Council England. Contact: [email protected]

For my families - inherited and chosen

Contents

I. PLEASE HAND OVER THE NAMES

YOU ANSWER MOST FAITHFULLY TO

tomcat

insulin-dependent

OUTPATIENT

hungry glitch

devastating

lemon

II. WHO WAS THERE WHEN THE WORST WAS HAPPENING? WHO WOULD COME IF WE PHONED & ASKED?

[Simon]

[Scarlett; Luke; Dylan; Adam]

[Q]

[Eloise]

[a girl], before

[CJ]

[John]

[ivy]

[Katie]

III. IS YOUR ILLNESS OLD ENOUGH TO HOLD A SENTENCE? TO DRINK FROM A BEAKER?

in june

it’s november

by february

in Cambridge

in the real world

after ward round

on both the night & day shift

inside

in jeans

in session

on re-admission to the real world

IV WHERE DO YOU THINK YOU WILL SURVIVE?

in your kitchen

in the train station

under branches

on the good days

in the dream

on the grass

in fullness

on the bus

back home

Acknowledgements

PLEASE HAND OVER THE NAMES

YOU ANSWER MOST FAITHFULLY TO

tomcat

i don’t look enough like the tubby girl

in my own ID photo / with my compressed

bones now / my jaw / a set square / the tomcat

curled up in my throat

closed windows have been steaming

my lungs / 2 dumplings changing texture

under my jumper / mina says my voice

is lower than when she met me

I love the sound my chest makes when I cough

when last Sunday my dad / took clippers to my hair

in the kitchen / sacred buzz softer than

the barber’s / chuckling behind his ready-readers

like the forgivable man / he has ripened into

my gender falling in clumps / we remembered

how to hug each other still / even

with my body / more boisterous

than it’s ever been / half the son

he hasn’t clocked he’s got

insulin-dependent

there’s hard work in keeping a body faulty.

so little honour in all the sums required

to swallow a sandwich, fed up on needles, the reasons

these muscles twitch, it’s tedious to go on

answering, numerically, what should be

in the blood, in the sauce of baked beans,

the split doses trickling into lame tissue, quietly, excelling

at masking all my clots & cannulas. here I am, faultily

vomiting at barbecues. at the mercy