Official Release Date July, 2024
AVAILABLE FOR PREORDER NOW!
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In her powerful chapbook Blue But Not Broken, Naoise Gale traces the myriad dislocations of autistic girlhood, from the first glimpses of childhood anxiety to aborted teenaged relationships and struggles with anorexia and addiction. These poems are gritty, vulnerable, tender; they form an elegy to a lost friend, and acknowledge the debt owed to relationships which weathered the harsh blue light of medical scrutiny. Eventually, a resilient neurodivergent voice emerges, wounded but nevertheless unbroken.
Official Release Date July, 2024
AVAILABLE FOR PREORDER NOW!
USD$14 plus shipping
“Blue But Not Broken is dually a delve into the human psyche and a wider exploration of what we mean to the people around us. Trauma and tenderness are expertly laid bare and Gale’s work is breathless, rooted, transcendent. It carves its own path through the themes we all think we know and shows us the burning issues that lie beneath. Raw seems an understatement when describing a collection that wounds with such excruciating, necessary purpose.”
—Laura Jane Round, Black Country-born performance poet and author of The Coveted (Cerasus Poetry, 2021)
“As a sister Lost Girl, this is poetry I’ve been waiting for my entire life. Naoise Gale’s gift for utterly original, bizarre, beautiful imagery that speaks the unspeakable is unmatched – she gives us glitter-bombed crabs; old ladies ‘wearing icy perms’; the sky as ‘spilt apple juice’; lightning; Catherine of Siena. But more than this – ‘let’s binge the distance’ – these poems are an earnest and total capturing of the neurodivergent female experience in all its trauma (or ‘meadows’): grief, fear, guilt, alienation, medical gaslighting, and agonising capacity for love. These poems are, admittedly, sometimes blue, but there is absolutely nothing broken about them…seldom have I read anything so whole.”
—Olivia Tuck, author of Things Only Borderlines Know (Black Rabbit Press, 2019); Assistant Editor of Lighthouse Journal and Tears in the Fence
“This collection from Naoise Gale is as blisteringly honest, heartbreaking at times, yet life-enhancing as her debut After The Flood Comes The Apologies. Yet here she digs deeper; her poetry fires and fries the synapses, her words lit by the stark fluorescent light of hospital wings and fizzing with the effervescence of pill-popped pharmaceuticals. An astonishingly mature collection from a vital new voice.”
—JP Seabright, Writer, and Assistant Editor, Full House Literary