Shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize.

An outstanding volume from Pascale Petit, follow-up to the best-selling The Zoo Father.

Pascale Petit’s last collection, The Zoo Father, was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot and Forward Prizes, and was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation. She was selected as one of the Poetry Society’s Next Generation Poets.

In Pascale Petit’s highly-charged third collection, a daughter is haunted by her mentally ill mother, and a painful childhood is re-imagined through a series of remarkable and passionate transformations. The feared mother is a rattlesnake, an Aztec goddess, a Tibetan singing bowl, a stalagmite, a praying mantis, a ghost orchid. These culminate in a long central poem where the daughter escapes her huntress as a cosmic stag. Underlying these poems is an intense mystical vision that lifts the dark material of the subject matter above the merely personal.