Ambush at Still Lake - Paperback

by Caroline Bird (Author)

A Financial Times Poetry Book of the Year 2024.
Caroline Bird's new poems show us the ambush of real life that occurs in the stillness after the happy ending. This collection explores marriage, lesbian parenthood, addiction and recovery, revealing a recurring dream: a world where mums impale themselves on pogo-sticks, serial killers rattle around in basements, and baby monitors are haunted by someone else's baby.
Through it all, love stays and stays like a stationary rollercoaster that turns out to be the scariest, most thrilling ride in the amusement park. It is bleak, repellent and hilarious in an American Psycho-ish way. Hectic and vivid. For readers of contemporary poetry, LGBTQ+ literature, and those who appreciate dark humor.

Author Biography

Caroline Bird's selected poems, Rookie (2022), and The Air Year (2020) are two of Carcanet's most popular books of the present decade. She won the Forward Prize for Best Collection in 2020, and has been shortlisted for a number of prizes including the T.S. Eliot Prize, the Costa Book Awards, the Ted Hughes Award, the Polari Prize and the Dylan Thomas Prize. A two-time winner of the Foyle Young Poets Award, her first collection Looking Through Letterboxes was published in 2002 when she was fifteen. She won a Cholmondeley Award in 2023.