Moon Jellyfish Can Barely Swim

'Sometimes in a writer's life an image arrives, unasked, and inhabits us, breeding connections through every compartment of our minds. This new collection by Ness Owen feels like one of those, with childhood memory, family, the politics of language, sense of place and an urgent environmental concern beyond human boundaries interwoven and embodied by the sight of that most liminal thing, a stranded jellyfish. It seems the slightest of lives, adrift, less flesh than water. And yet, like these poems, it can sting.' - Philip Gross

Rooted in her island home, Ness Owen's second collection explores what it is to subsist with whatever the tides bring in poems that journey from family to politics, womanhood and language.Moon jellyfish live a life adrift, relying on the current to take them where they need to go. They are the ultimate survivors and one of the most successful organisms of animal life. So how do they thrive in the open ocean when they can barely swim? Rooted in her island home, Ness Owen's second collection explores what it is to subsist with whatever the tides bring in poems that journey from family to politics, womanhood and language. In the ebb and flow of an ever-changing world, starlings fall from the sky, votes are cast, a village is drowned, a petrified forest is revealed and messages wash up in seaworn bottles on the shoreline, waiting for answers that will not come.