Tigress

Jessica Mookherjee, highly commended in the 2017 Forward Prizes, presents her second collection of poems, Tigress. Mixing myth, magic and migration, these poems explore the impact of choice upon our lives and concentrate their magnificent, kaleidoscopic imagination on the intricate and often fraught nature of childhood and family, selfhood and womanhood.

Fierce, often funny, always charged and revealing, Mookerjee's acute attention to detail tracks lives lived between Bengal, Wales and London. In exploring the intense displacement and loss that marks the experience of migration, the poems move into territories of danger and safety, illness and heartbreak, and ultimately into self-discovery; a rich and sensual moonlit menagerie of bears, big cats, wolves, and 'forest mothers'. At every step, Tigress is wildly inventive, elegant and utterly distinctive.

"The poems in Tigress are born out of families, migrations, transformations and the intimacies of altered lives on shifting ground where the everyday meets the deep myths by which we measure ourselves. The poems speak plainly but break against oceanic complexities that continually surprise us." - George Szirtes

Auteur

Jessica Mookherjee lives in Kent. Her work appears in many journals including Agenda, Poetry Wales, The North, Rialto, Under the Radar, Poetry Birmingham Literary Journal and in various anthologies including Bloodaxe's Staying Human. She was highly commended in the 2017 and 2021 Forward Prizes for Best Single Poem. She is author of two full collections, Flood (Cultured Llama, 2018) and Tigress, ( Nine Arches Press 2019) which was shortlisted for the Ledbury Munthe Prize for Best Second Collection in 2021. She is a joint editor of Against the Grain Poetry Press.

Texte du rabat

Jessica Mookherjee, highly commended in the 2017 Forward Prizes, presents her second collection of poems, Tigress. Mixing myth, magic and migration, these poems explore the impact of choice upon our lives and concentrate their magnificent, kaleidoscopic imagination on the intricate and often fraught nature of childhood and family, selfhood and womanhood. Fierce, often funny, always charged and revealing, Mookerjee's acute attention to detail tracks lives lived between Bengal, Wales and London. In exploring the intense displacement and loss that marks the experience of migration, the poems move into territories of danger and safety, illness and heartbreak, and ultimately into self-discovery; a rich and sensual moonlit menagerie of bears, big cats, wolves, and 'forest mothers'. At every step, Tigress is wildly inventive, elegant and utterly distinctive.