top of page
Search
  • Writer's pictureCarrie Etter

Denise Riley's Say Something Back (Picador, 2016), second selection


More favourite passages:

As clouds swell to damply fill gaps in mountains, so in

Illness we sense, solidly, our entrails expanding to stuff

That space of our innerness just feebly imagined before.

*

The sorrows brood inside our purplish spleens, barriers

That check dark moods of sultry bile by segregating it

Where it can't seep to hurt us. Anatomised emotion.

from "The patient who had no insides"

A moon in daylight, whitest blue on blue,

surprises briefly, to appear surreal

until it slips to rights.

*

I sensed your not-there in its burning life.

I listened out to feel its silence beat.

It does not speak with any human mouth.

from "Hiding in plain sight"



7 views0 comments

Recent Posts

See All

Autumn Events

While the busyness of the autumn term, alongside teaching my online Reading to Write Prose Poetry course, means that I'm not doing a lot of events in the next few months (I'm also gearing up for the l

Writing Short Stories

I've been writing and publishing short stories as long as I've been writing and publishing poems--that is, since I was a teenager. In the 80s, I largely wrote stories (hopefully now lost) for a Midwes

bottom of page