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

Political, ecological and emotional turbulence provide the backdrop for this charged meditation on nature, self and the city. These poems, intensely committed and deeply personal, inspire an ‘activism of the heart as well as the mind’. 'A strange and stunning collection from a true writer. Vulnerable, hilarious and wise, Seasonal Disturbances is a darkly humorous exploration of the human condition.'
Young Poet Laureate for London, Warsan Shire

Second Place Winner of the 2020 Laurel Prize for Ecopoetry
A 2017 Poetry Book Society Recommendation
Following her groundbreaking 2014 début 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 émigré, 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’.
Cover Illustration: Nuri R. Melgarejo