Know Thy Audience

"Menace turned inside out! 'When I die I want to come back as a piercing sound / In the ear of every rapist.' Here is the poetry without the hero, a blanket leaving you colder somehow, but you know this book is brilliant, and you know you will live with these poems for the rest of your life once you have read them. I am a huge fan of Nadia de Vries, a poet wrangling suffering bodies on the map of a world we like to think we know, offering us no easy answers." CAConrad ----------"Know Thy Audience is a revelation, and confirms that De Vries is an extraordinarily significant, vital voice in English-language poetry." Ralf Webb ---------- "In her visceral and razor-sharp poems, Nadia de Vries navigates the circular relationship between perpetration and victimhood, assuaging the catharsis often seen as intrinsic to writing and opening up new paths to redemption." Hannah Pezzack ---------- "Nadia de Vries' poetry is as precise as a surgical tool and as turbulent and anarchic as blood gushing from a wound." Francesca Kritikos ---------- "Know Thy Audience tangles us into the ease with which we can be violated, into that very violence, and the frontlines of the war. 'How do you depict a stabbing motion in a poem?' Here's how." M.M. Garr ----------- "These tiny, curt and stark poems are anthems of empowerment for anyone who has ever had to claw their way out." Lucy K .Shaw