Boi / Nicola Bray

‘Nicola Bray’s poetry is taut, complex, nuanced, sometimes achingly surreal, and always beautifully queer.’ Richard Scott

‘Nic Bray’s Boi is shot through with original and startling images. It mixes certainty with doubt – it registers the dawning of familiar and unfamiliar feelings alike.’ Bill Greenwell

In Boi, Nicola Bray recasts gender as poetry, as a grounding, as blurred ink, slippery and fishlike. This speaker reminds us that selfhood is not a mast to which we are tied, but the waves we traverse, still or stormy, pulling us under, lifting us up. The journey here speaks to predecessors, to an ancient story with no archive. Bray’s linguistic and narrative art is both precise and instinctive: we feel our way through it, knowing by touch rather than sight, that we have been here before.

PAPERBACK    ISBN: 978-1-913268-18-3    PUBLISHED: 14TH JULY 2021