Impossible Heat

‘Impossible Heat is a work of claustrophobia, heat, and longing. In these poems, sexual ideation extends from the mind of the speaker to color and consume everything - the Titanic is a lesbian, the iceberg is…also a lesbian. Long lines and rich cadences hold the reader in a vice, just as the speaker is offered no reprieve from her own intensity of feeling. Amidst the erotic, there is a profound hopelessness, but that doesn’t stop the poems from also being witty and manic, as the speaker struggles with privacy and performance, with a fear of perception but a desperate need to be perceived. The emotional incisiveness of this work is stark, its euphony sumptuous.’ Susannah Dickey; ‘Impossible Heat is a nest-making of threads and mirrors. Here are sapphic rorschachs revealing everything and nothing that might be told in ‘the salt content of sweat’ and the tonguing indent of lyric — with lashings of memory’s ‘golden abrasions’. These are generous poems that drift through the gap someone left in your bedroom window. Here are dreams, ‘tragedies of homosexuality’, domestic horror shows, a cascade of utopian performatives, moonlight, a summer that may or may not ever end. What innocence is lost or won in love is felt in the sensory plenitude of our speaker’s imagination. Ciara Maguire is a master of anaphora, list and simile. Think: the ardent fort-da of texting a recalcitrant lover. Think: sun-sized epiphanies and erotic ponytails. Think: ‘dyke like held together with glue’. Impossible Heat surrenders to its own melting, poems yielding magical hyperobjects (‘lesbian iceberg’) which will metabolise into tender adhesives, binding us irresistibly to this book. Dailiness as irresolute, intimate assembly. This is a work of devotion, connection, eclipse, desire and discovery. Its charm is quietly devastating.’ Maria Sledmere