‘This startlingly original debut delves into the surreal, concealed moments of a young womanhood. Helen Quah’s voice is in part a deep-calling into the complex distances between mother and daughter, in part a twisted venture into the contradictions of romance. Dog Woman, named after the series of artworks by Paula Rego, contorts language, opening up a playfully dark and often humorous space of the fantastical and otherwise unexplained.

In these beautiful, uncanny, hot-blooded tableaus Quah offers an ominous symbolism of life as an unresolvable drama, the sound and contrast up a little too loud for safety or comfort. Reading her lines felt like following a corridor to its end only to find a door opening onto a further corridor/door/corridor/door…only these corridors are lives, places, families, feelings; this way Quah has you wandering through your own interior as a voyeur and hostage of your own imagination.’ — Jack Underwood

Helen Quah is a British poet of Guyanese and Chinese-Malaysian descent. Her poetry has been short-listed for the Aesthetica Creative Writing Award in 2020 and she came third place in the Verve Poetry Prize in 2021 for an early version of ‘When I marry a white man’. She currently works as a junior doctor in London.