The Exclusion Zone

An imaginative, high concept and distinctive new collection from the winner of the Shapcott Prize and the ALS Gold Medal.

You don’t remember this place. This land could be
arid or hungry or wet or rot. That does not matter. Your memory
can’t tell you what no longer exists.

Beginning in the nuclear waste deposits of our future, The Exclusion Zone bears witness in a language degrading faster than the radioactive byproducts of our history and our present. At once prophecy and annihilation, these poems speak with ghosts, questioning how our words – and what they seek to preserve – can contend with the inevitability of their own decay. Nuclear materials drift throughout this collection, metastasising and resisting their own disposal. The Exclusion Zone is a poetry of warning, of seance, of incantation – a poetry of what survives, where the apocalypse-to-be manifests in human tenderness and vulnerability.