Poetry
Category: Individual Collections, Poetry
Number of pages: 86
ISBN: 9781911752134
Publication date: July 22, 2026
Price: £10.99
“A menagerie of voices, angles, inventions and images – restless yet searching. This collection will take roost in your brain.” – Caroline Bird
Menagerie Street is a striking debut poetry collection inspired by Thrutopia – a movement which imagines ways through to thriving, positive futures for our planet. Formally playful and emotionally generous, Hilary Watson’s poems move between humour and gravity, alive to ethical pressures and attentive to animals, landscapes, queer desire, bodies, and forms of kinship that resist easy definition. With wit, tenderness and hope, she asks how we live, love, and act together, offering poems that are by turns funny, unsettling, and quietly exhilarating.
Hilary Watson
Hilary Watson lives in Cardiff and grew up in South Wales. She graduated from the University of Warwick with a BA and MA in Writing. She was a Jerwood/Arvon mentee with mentor Caroline Bird. Her poetry has been published widely in magazines across the UK and internationally, and she has placed in a number of poetry prizes including being shortlisted for Live Canon, Verve and the Troubador Poetry Prize. She is one of the founding editors at the thrutopian writing magazine Bending The Arc. Her collaborative thrutopian poetry pamphlet, with poets Ilse Pedler and Alice Willitts, We’ll Meet You There was published by Dialect Press March 2026. Her debut collection Menagerie Street was published in 2026.
“Menagerie Street is a call for us to rewild… A profound read and a family of poems I will come home to over and over to remember where I belong and what I am bound to protect. Let the familiar song at the heart of this book call to your wild heart too.”
clare e potter
“Hilary Watson has a distinct poetic voice that never fails to draw me into a world that is both deeply known and felt, and at the same time coursing with strangeness, mystery and a kind of magic… These poems explore the hard, dangerous facts of women’s survival, hidden desire, grief, trauma… This menagerie belongs in the world: its roar will be heard far and wide.”
Katherine Stansfield
“Menagerie Street delights and astonishes. Hilary Watson animates streets, animals, and human gestures with care and clarity. Playful, vivid, and morally alert, these poems make you notice the world differently, feel its weight and wonder, and return to it again. A collection that is both joyous and uncompromisingly alive.”
David Morley
