The Sealey Challenge: DAY 1

Space Baby by Suzannah Evans

sliding smaller and smaller / to a speck / beyond the edge / of the magnetosphere

Suzannah Evans is a poet, creative writing tutor and editor based in Sheffield, which is a city I love and a place that needs to be visited again sooner rather than later.

I picked Space Baby as my first title because of it’s title, which might seem a bit odd until you know how important science and science fiction are in my life. Then it makes a lot more sense. The poem I chose to highlight for social media as a result was Supermassive Black Hole.

Is Suzannah also a Muse fan, like me?

Lessons from the Text

Wow, is this an accomplished body of work, from start to finish. You can feel the time and thought stitched into every piece, plus the obvious care and consideration over both form and content. I also LOVE that the more obscure references are explained. I wish more poets did this, so that I can be reassured of what spawned certain poems into existence.

There’d been a hope for more sci-fi (I always want more sci-fi) but that initial desire was quickly put to one side, and a great deal of respect has formed having read this now through more than the specified single pass that Sealey asks of you. It was when I got the meaning of How We Miss Them that the true power of this collection really hit home.

Suzannah’s work is both conventional and startling, and gave me as a reader viewpoints of events and ideas that I had never considered before. The best poetry challenges you to look away from your own life and to experience how it feels to be on a different side of the same concepts. This collection has given me a great deal to think about as a result.

Will you read it again? Absolutely I will. This is rich, smart and makes me feel both comfortable and unsettled reading it. It’s a clever writer that keeps challenging you on each new viewing.

Would you recommend it for me to read? Absolutely I would. Make sure you have a decent cuppa to go with it. Mine went cold whilst I was note-taking, which is ALWAYS a good sign.

Here’s the Link to the Nine Arches Press Website.