Sarah Jackson explores the edges of writing in this uncanny book of touch. Tender, haunting, and yet beautifully poised, the poems in Pelt get right under your skin. The collection takes you on an unsettling journey between infancy and adulthood. Slipping from birds to blindness, from hides to hiding, Pelt uncovers the unfamiliar in the everyday. Pelt is written in the dark. It asks to be read through your fingertips. Striking and elegant, subtle and yet full of desire, this is a brilliant debut.
'Sarah Jackson's poems are dark, strange stories, immaculately crafted. Surprising, dextrous, sometimes shocking, they compel the reader into uncertain territory. This is an assured first collection from a cool and original new voice' -POLLY CLARK
These poems have a dream-like, hallucinatory quality. Intriguing and mysterious, they transform childhood memory, myth, experiences of place, everything Sarah Jackson draws on for material, into surreal and vivid narratives' -VICKI FEAVER
'Sarah Jackson's Pelt is out on its own. At once peirastic and assured, these are poems of disturbing grace and power. They have a compelling strangeness, uncomfortably intimate and elusive at the same time. It is a work of glints and disclosures, by turns gentle and menacing, diurnal and surreal, erotic and deranged. In radical and original fashion, Pelt prompts feelings 'we can neither know/ nor name'. Here is a new voice, a pelting of voices in English poetry' -NICHOLAS ROYLE
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[For years I've hid / in a cracked hotel / tipping the moors - VANISHING TWIN]***
(@BloodaxeBooks, 1 May 2012, 64 pages, ebook from @natpoetrylib via @OverDriveLibs)
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Pelt is one of the most dazzling collections of poetry I've read in ages. Jackson writes the sort of poems I love to read and write though I read them so rarely now. The poems are about as far from ordinary as poems can be. They're sort of a blend of horror and fantasy with a few dashes of magic realism thrown in. I loved every word. I could read Pelt over and over again and find something new every time. Pelt is creepy but completely mesmerising.
