Seasonal Disturbances

*Karen's first book, An Aviary of Small Birds, a Guardian Book of the Year, a PBS Recommendation, was shortlisted for Forward Prize 2015 Best First Collection*Selected for the European poetry initiative Versopolis and US Breaking Ground BME writer tour*Poet in Residence at Greenwich Maritime Museum, Karen gave voice to migrants and refugees, then performed at international festivals in Sweden, the Caribbean and Mexico

Set against a backdrop of ecological, political and emotional turbulence, Seasonal Disturbances is a charged yet meditative exploration of the relationship between nature, the city and the self in the 21st centurySecond Place winner of the 2020 Laurel Prize for Ecopoetry. A 2017 Poetry Book Society Recommendation. Following her groundbreaking 2014 debut An Aviary of Small Birds (`technically perfect poems of winged heartbreak' - Observer), Karen McCarthy Woolf returns with Seasonal Disturbances. Set against a backdrop of ecological and emotional turbulence, these poems are charged yet meditative explorations of nature, the city, and the self. A sinister CEO presides over a dystopian hinterland where private detectives investigate crimes against hollyhocks; Halcyon is discovered as a dead kingfisher, washed up on an Italian beach. Lyrical and inventive, McCarthy Woolf's poems test classic and contemporary forms, from a disrupted zuihitsu that considers her relationship with water, to the landay, golden shovel, and gram of &. As a fifth-generation Londoner and daughter of a Jamaican emigre, McCarthy Woolf makes a variety of linguistic subversions that critique the rhetoric of the British class system. Political as they may be, these poems are not reportage: they aim to inspire what the author describes as an `activism of the heart, where we connect to and express forces of renewal and love'.