Exquisite Prisons David Gardiner

Exquisite Prisons David GardinerEdward ODwyers poems in Exquisite Prisons pack the quotidian with a creeping terror; motorists nervously migrate to investigate the car stalled at the lights, a father is filmed throwing his child higher and higher, a husband wonders if his wife also fantasises about killing him. These poems are savagely ironic, authoritative and delivered in an unsettling coaxing voice that occupies that same dazzling imaginative territory as Shirley Jackson in The

but explains what they have meant to him over time

When more people think they’ve seen a ghost than met a trans person

she is not afraid to take on the themes of honour killings or the American occupation of Iraq

but Jane Aldous

after the military coup their Santiago apartment was used as a safe house by the Movimiento de Izquierda Revolucionaria

"The weight of each line here

as well as of our place in a globalised world where health has become a major issue

Cecilia McGovern was born in County Mayo and has lived in Dublin all her adult life

at the other

I buried the bird

its music grave and necessary as time

identity and literature