Inmates

(Paperback)

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A remarkably original young British poet- chosen as one of the most recent decade's Next Generation Poets - alongside Adam Foulds, Helen Mort and Kate Tempest. The poems of Inmates stage encounters with insects at sites and moments of their refuge, torpor, hatching or fighting, of traversing a floor in the night or climbing a wall, of their death and decay - all in and around the house of the writer, with whom they are sharing time, as fellow inmates. There is an urgency to these poems, emerging from the instant of their writing, and the close attention Borodale brings to his observation of the natural world results in poems of real intensity. Inmates is an attempt to co-exist with the natural world - examining it, intimately, at the edge of language itself, where the human voice begins to break apart.

Reviews

Borodale's writing offers both passport and revelation; his subjects are often close to death, or decay... In poems as finely balanced and perilous as watercolour paintings, he builds a world of threat, yet also with reverence for the tones and form of the most vulnerable. -- Martyn Halsall * Church Times *
Extraordinary...Every page, nearly every stanza of this collection bears such treasures. * Harvard Review *

Author Bio

Sean Borodale was born in London and works as a poet and artist. His first collection of poetry, Bee Journal, was shortlisted for the 2012 Aldeburgh First Collection Prize, the Costa Poetry Book Award and the T. S. Eliot Prize. In 2014 he was selected as one of twenty Next Generation Poets. He currently teaches Creative Writing at Royal Holloway.