apricot is a devastating debut from one of the UK’s brightest and most fascinating poets, written with the urgency of someone who knows they might not make it through the weekend. Katie O’Pray’s is a highly articulate poetics, kicking against the language of convention that would seek to limit us. The improvisational vocabulary at play here engenders both a developed identity and a young identity continuously being made, as each section of the book subverts the questions of mental health practitioners with wisdom and panache.

These poems do not just concern the violence of gender, of sexuality, of disability, of addiction, they reinvigorate how these violences can be understood. This is a collection of singular quality.

Katie O’Pray is a poet based in Bedfordshire, who is studying Linguistics & Creative Writing at the University of Hertfordshire. Their work has most notably received recognition from the Magma Poetry Competition and the Out-Spoken Prize for Poetry, as well as being shared in support of The National Survivor User Network and ELFT’s ‘Break the Stigma’ campaign. In 2021, they won the Oxford Brookes International Poetry Competition and were awarded The ruth weiss Foundation’s Emerging Poet Grant.

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