Notes from the North

Notes from the North is horrific, powerful, and astute, full of passion and moral authority. Although weve heard about the brutal dictatorship of North Korea before, these poems surpass journalism and bring us the voices on the brink, with the compelling urgency of a diary of contemporary tyranny and the havoc it wreaks. This is a scorched family album, rescued from the ruins Amy Wack Felt music, acute with historys pain, and still the uplift towards redemption ripples over the sharp tercets which are like jagged stairs back / to that world without words, // where tongueless cells / first hunger, brood, divide. Brood! A perfectly timed elongation pushing against the final rupture. Ishion Hutchinson, The Well Review Poetry Prize 2019 Another marvellous achievement is its rough music, syllable by syllable, magically contribut[ing] to a euphony which would have been cacophonous in the hands of a lesser poet. And thats all before we absorb the subject matter an account of love whose subject is fragile and potentially vulnerable to horrific loss. Patrick Cotter, Gregory ODonoghue Award

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