Before Violence
Format:Paperback
Publisher:Carcanet Press Ltd
Publishing:26th Mar '26
£12.99
This title is due to be published on 26th March, and will be despatched as soon as possible.
A Poetry Book Society Recommendation
Praising Joe Carrick Varty’s debut, the T.S. Eliot Prize judges observed that his work ‘confronts fraught spaces of addiction and domestic violence […its] lyricism shaped by a raw and fragmented reality’.
His outstanding second collection reflects further on growing up under the cloud of abuse and alcoholism, unfolding compelling patterns as it examines how the past shapes our future lives. Bold and unusual in form, its three gripping long poems look unflinchingly and unforgettably at inheritance, pain and memory.
‘Before Violence charts ideas around fate and lineages, and how we can, or can’t, interrupt what might lie in wait for us.
Skies are brought into proximity with glowing bodies of water, the parts of the body closest to our intimacies with other people – hands and faces – are positioned as recipients of care and violence, and capable of complicity in both.
The poems play with scale and time to create a forceful narrative that moves from childhood to adulthood, and thinks towards the various futures that close and open to us through a structure that initially cracks, then reassembles.
This book is an elegy to personal histories, and a long ode to making peace with hopeful pathways.’
Rachael Allen
- Commended for Poetry Book Society Recommendation 2026
ISBN: 9781800175426
Dimensions: unknown
Weight: unknown
168 pages