Author: Ralphs, Camille (Poetry Editor)
Poetry
Published on 14 March 2024 by FABER & FABER in the United Kingdom.
Paperback | 96 pages
129 x 197 x 9 | 122g
This extraordinary debut heralds the arrival of a major new talent.
In After You Were, I Am, charged moments from history collide with our own godless modern world. The book's three sections - ingenious rewritings of canonical prayers, dramatic monologues from the Pendle witch trials of 1612, and the divine tragedy of the Elizabethan magus John Dee - obsess over individual human characters and how our past informs (and informs on) our present. Ralphs's style is utterly distinctive; she is a modern metaphysical, tapping into a haunting, era-spanning utterance enlivened by the electric pulse of wordplay and imaginative conceit. This is poetry that in comprehending the past manages to make of it something utterly original and contemporary.