A visionary debut collection exploring our intimate and ecological dependencies
Daisy Lafarge was born in Hastings and studied at the University of Edinburgh. Her debut novel, Paul, is forthcoming from Granta Books. She has published two pamphlets of poetry: understudies for air (Sad Press, 2017) and capriccio (SPAM Press, 2019), and her visual work has been exhibited in galleries such as Tate St Ives and Talbot Rice Gallery. She has received an Eric Gregory Award and a Betty Trask Award, and was runner-up in the 2018 Edwin Morgan Poetry Award. Daisy is currently working on Lovebug - a book about infection and intimacy - for a practice-based PhD at the University of Glasgow. Life Without Air is her first collection of poetry.
Lafarge's is a fierce, clear-eyed poetry that expresses the sticky
relationality between human pain and non-human destruction; the
unsettling intimacy of our shared afflictions * Guardian *
Startlingly fresh, at once assertive and tender, light and dark,
she manages to be consistently surprising-often in unexpected ways.
The range of work showcased here is impressive in itself; add the
dry wit, a flare for the surreal and bright flashes of lost reality
[...] and try not to be wholly engaged, refreshed and enthused --
Janice Galloway
'Daisy Lafarge's Life Without Air is a whip-smart, sonically
gorgeous exploration of the personal, cultural, and historical ties
that bind us in literally and figuratively toxic relationships.
From the marram beach grass that supports the dunes that threaten
to choke it in "Desecration Air" to the toxic lakes created by rare
earth mining that power our "green" technologies in "Dredging
Baotou Lake," Lafarge shows us how deeply embedded we are with what
harms us. These poems are as subtle and complex as the insidious
relationships they illustrate. Life Without Air is the right book
for our far-gone moment -- Rae Armantrout, author of Pulitzer
Prized winning * Versed *
The eye's visual field is only 5%, only 5% of what we see is in
focus. Daisy Lafarge's poems specialise in reclaiming what we lose
to habitual perception, and her language has the directness and
exactitude of a specialised lexis; not jargon, but a methodical
application to its subject. Daisy's poems look through a
microscope: her language like a lens delicately rendering to make
sense of things; a view so complicated by its alert optics and
detailing that we lose an ordinary sense of what it is we're
looking at; but what we gain is a heightened sense of its surfaces,
its light, its mechanics. We exchange the outlines of life for a
small, truer piece of the matter itself. Like pond water pushed
through a soda stream, or language diffusing through the permeable
membrane of the wall of the cell, exchanging complex sugars,
changing its behaviour -- Jack Underwood, author of * Happiness
*
Warm-blooded and intimate as much as it is mind-expanding * New
Statesman *
A vivid and evocative collection... Fusing science, literature and
art, Lafarge intellectually explores the ecosystem that human
environments can permeate... Lafarge has set the bar high with this
wonderful debut collection * The Fountain *
This book's poetry deftly melds nonhuman, environmental exploration
with biting considerations of misogyny and toxic relationships.
It's fiercely original, strange and vital -- Books of the Year *
Ignota *
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