Sparrow on the Rooftop

‘Rachel Long’s exceptionally brave and urgent new collection dexterously transmutes raw pain and trauma into the most exquisitely transcendent poetry. It moves, shocks and inspires’ * Bernardine Evaristo, author of GIRL, WOMAN, OTHER *
‘A very moving account of a woman's journey through heartbreak, body trauma and overcoming. At turns tender and fierce, sensual and grotesque, Long writes with great power and kaleidoscopic emotion. A wonderful read from an arresting voice’ * Diana Evans, author of ORDINARY PEOPLE *
‘These poems are gruesome and intimate, alive to the rot, funny. Quite often a line will come back to me, unsettle me, give me hope not because it’s hopeful, but because it exists’ * Saba Sams, author of GUNK *
‘For a poet who can saunter through heaven, Long is mercilessly precise when it comes to writing despair. To craving, squalor and grief she gives a body, an architecture – a liver that cries out for mercy, a honey aisle for longing in. From this precision, and from the poet’s cool humour, comes a trust in the poem’s wisdom, its conviction in how the will to live, by increments, gets rebuilt’ * Amber Husain, author of TELL ME HOW YOU EAT *
‘In Sparrow On The Rooftop, Rachel Long has delivered her most realised, intimate and gracefully chaotic poems yet. Where there is sadness there is also satire and play and unflinching honesty. Long has a rare knack for writing sex and relationships that are sometimes tender, rough, painful, but always with the heart of a poet that is quietly agonising for meaningful touch’ * Raymond Antrobus, author of The Quiet Ear *
‘Deeply embodied, risky and darkly lyric, Sparrow on the Rooftop is a stunning collection which uses language as a tool to interrogate the long tendrils of religion, heartbreak and, importantly, shame. The expert and inimitable Rachel Long reminds us that the poet is, just like the sparrow in her collection, a singer – whose song, here, is one of wild resilience and a shocking power’ * Richard Scott, author of That Broke Into Shining Crystals *
‘Sparrow on a Rooftop draws on a biblical metaphor that explores deep isolation and sorrow. The book becomes a delta, where the rivers of the body and desire meet, criss-cross, surge and resist each other. It is a riveting work about life, love and ultimately survival that everyone should read’ * Roger Robinson, author of A PORTABLE PARADISE *
‘This new collection by Rachel Long is an event. A sequence of poems raw, vulnerable, open-hearted and threaded through with exceptional pain and longing for beauty, a pain and beauty that runs in tandem and in friction. I read this collection with my heart in my mouth for its assertion of a contemporary confessional, something like vermeil, a lyric that coats or gilds a brittle beauty over the squalid reality of bad love and complex relationships with the body, the high and the low held masterfully within the same paragraphs, sentences and words. The consequences of a love affair, a news cycle, of family history, rings out of the controlled syntactical containment like a piercing alarm, stings like a bit of grim light through a closed curtain on a hangover, squats in the front room like a yellowing old sofa. Sadness and happiness are negotiated as though being juggled, and what remains is the pulsing urge to live and also to love, others but mainly the self’ * Rachael Allen, author of KINGDOMLAND *
‘Rachel Long’s new collection is a lyrical blade of truth and insight. I’m sure Sylvia Plath, Sharon Olds, and Tracey Emin would be beaming with pride. This collection is a mirror that casts a sharp, unflinching reflection’ * Nick Makoha, author of THE NEW CARTHAGINIANS *
‘Sparrow on the Rooftop is an astonishing, hard-won poetic achievement – a journal from the depths of sorrow and darkness lit up at every step by Long’s vital and luminous imaginative clarity. In finding the words to talk back to the universe, these songs out of silence offer us inspiration of the most clear-sighted and courageous kind’ * Jane Draycott, author of FULVIA *