House However

As if through a prism, this sequence of sixty-two poems examines and questions the elusive from all angles and, by trying to make sense of chaos, they discover patches of light that guide both poet and reader towards a resolution: that we must live any way we can. House However has been reworked and reduced entirely to the suggestive. Suggestive of what? Of human solitude, of alienation, of wonderment, of what each individual reader can make of it – the defamiliarisation of our most intimate personal and domestic items and surroundings. It acts as a reminder that, while looking after others, we must tend to our own body and spirit in order to survive. "In these poems – portraits of objects and emotions – Kathrine Sowerby animates a world we ignore, she reinvents a world with a compelling internal logic. With her repetitions, revisitings, recurrences and restatings of that logic, her unique, fresh and dislocating world is made solid. With her astonishingly beautiful rhythms, of each individual poem and of the book as a symphony, Sowerby demonstrates that not only is she inheritor of Gertrude Stein’s musicality, but she moves deep into the twenty-first century: speculative, precise, intelligent and utterly attentive." – Gerry Loose

“The writing in this glorious triptych of stories is as you’d expect from a poet of Sowerby’s talent – concise, evocative and seductive.” Elizabeth Reeder on The Spit, the Sound and the Nest; “in the colours of grief and magic, it is a fearless search for love and understanding that shapes an impasto of wisdom and bewilderment in which `everything is possible’” Mark Russell on Tired Blue Mountain; “a human document willed into being by sheer force of hope” Peter Manson on Unnecessarily Emphatic; "attentive to the worlds of possibility that lie in speech and language, it is musical, lyrical, vital, vivid – set in the conversational tone of a friend you never knew you had” Gerry Loose on That Bird Loved

Kathrine Sowerby is a writer living in Glasgow. Her poems and stories have been published widely in journals and anthologies and she has taken part in translation projects in Pakistan and Latvia. She has an MFA from Glasgow School of Art, an MLitt in Creative Writing from Glasgow University, and she won a 2013 New Writers Award from the Scottish Book Trust. Her chapbooks Unnecessarily Emphatic and Tired Blue Mountain were published by Red Ceilings Press, her collection that bird loved by Hesterglock Press and also published by Vagabond Voices is her book of stories The Spit, The Sound and The Nest.