Winner of the London Festival Fringe Prize for the Best First Collection of Poetry 2010.

American expatriate Carrie Etter’s debut collection, The Tethers, introduces a compelling new voice. By turns wry, celebratory, and pensive, the poems roam from an imaginary village to Manhattan, the southwestern U.S., London, the Czech Republic, and Etter’s homeland, the Illinois prairie. With a lyric intensity born of compression and linguistic precision, The Tethers’ travels are as much psychological as physical, exploring the life of the mind as it engages with delight and despair, pleasure and hardship, in an unusually mature first book.

Originally from Normal, Illinois, Carrie Etter lives in Bradford on Avon and teaches creative writing at Bath Spa University.