Spine

Sarah Caulfield's work is inspired-in the antique sense of the verb inspirare, to impart, to instill, to breathe life into. Fully inhabiting the fragility and messiness of ailing bodies and anxious minds, Caulfield probes with surgical ruthlessness and hard-earned empathy into the meat of something that might be called (if this collection did not resist the clichés of universality) the human condition. "Your spine is made of beach glass," a time-traveling woman, speaking "To The Girl I Was," informs her past self. "It will withstand." The same is true of the seventeen spoken-word poems that make up the vertebrae of SPINE. These are stories about pain and compassion, despair and endurance, doubt and faith, that will not "fade in the telling." They will withstand.-Samantha Pious, Finalist for the 2015 Charlotte Mew Prize SPINE stitches together a mythology of sickness, without romanticising it-this is vital, visceral work, grounded in the realities of blood and bone. Glittering fragments of imagery repeat and refract throughout the collection, weaving through a world of sterile hospital walls and incense-rich catholic churches. Here, religion, sex, illness, and death all bleed into each other: themes not isolated but mutually entrenched, and foundational to Caulfield's voice. This complex self-portrait is an assured debut that overwhelms the senses and improves on every reading.-Hel Robin Gurney, nominee for the Rhysling Poetry Award, spoken word performer and scholar (The Sleeping Princess, EdFringe, 2016) Sarah Caulfield's writing is contemporary and engaging. Honest and important. I'm really happy to have a writer like Sarah creating LGBT work that is likely to be read forever; she makes the new writers' landscape much more exciting.-Remilyn Browne Oshibanjo, member of London-based creative collective SXWKS, author of these are the most terrifying thoughts