Kit

(Hardback)

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Description

'In both its open-throated exclamations and its concentrated meditations on myriad forms of pain and joy [...] Kit reaches places other books don't.' - Max Porter

Megan and Kit met in their early twenties. Their friendship was intense, wild and true.

Years later, when Kit becomes desperately unwell, Megan tries to pull her old friend back from the precipice, navigating the difficulties of revisiting a relationship conceived in the great freedom of youth, whilst attempting to remain fully present in the messy beauty of her family life.

Kit is a story of the sumptuous complication - and precariousness - of life and relationships. It describes a call to intimacy in a state of emergency. It is a story of one life disrupted as another moves toward its end.

Told in a spare, winding prose-poem, with a voice reminiscent of Max Porter, Elizabeth Smart, Kae Tempest and Rebecca Watson, Kit is a splintered, powerful work of empathy, friendship and unconditional love.

Reviews

'This beautiful, unflinching book asks us what it might mean to truly confront loss - its shame, its intimacies, its clarifying horrors, the ways it forces us to relearn how to live.' - Keiran Goddard, author of Hourglass

''Kit is love and pain distilled: a book of extraordinary force. It left me reeling for days'' - Tom Bullough, author of Addlands

'In both its open-throated exclamations and its concentrated meditations on myriad forms of pain and joy [...] Kit reaches places other books don't.' - Max Porter

'Extraordinary [...] It is a "poultice of words" - something that brings feeling to the surface. It bears witness to death, and how the living live with it.' - Padraig O Tuama, editor of Poetry Unbound: 50 Poems to Open Your World

'If I put it down for a moment on almost every page it was only to steady myself, or to savour, or marvel, and occasionally (thank God) to laugh. I can't wait to read it again.' - Sue Peebles, author of Snake Road

Author Bio

Megan Barker lives in South Wales. She has a background in theatre, and her plays have been produced at theatres such as Soho Theatre, Sherman Cymru, The Arches, The Traverse and The Tron. She also writes song lyrics, most recently for Quiet River of Dust by Richard Reed Parry.