Home

Emily Critchley

Home, the latest collection from writer Emily Critchley, is part experimental confession, part elegiac plea. It is an exploration of the damage done by, in and to many different manifestations of ‘home’: with poetry about child abuse, wrongful imprisonment, #MeToo, borders, Brexit, ‘our lost biophilia’ and global warming, among other issues. It is also an attempt to work through the pieces of a broken family, a broken society and a broken planet, with the only tools the poet can summon.

Whatever shards of hope we may pick out of the wreckage must be in the understanding that we are capable of doing more – as individuals and collectively – to write a different future for ourselves and those with whom we share, indeed create, ‘home’. This collection looks to a new ‘binding ground’ – something stabler beneath all our feet – and hopes a turning point, a ‘being otherwise’, may be under way.