After You Were, I Am

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.

Camille Ralphs is a poet and critic, and an editor at the Times Literary Supplement. Her poems and essays have appeared in numerous magazines, including the New York Review of Books, Poetry Review and the Los Angeles Review of Books.