Significant Other

"There’s love, yes, and there’s desire in this book. She uses Donna Haraway as an epigraph to the book, so the question in all of the poems is really about companionship, which is in some ways a different kind of love. I think it’s incredibly powerful in the way it slips between the kinds of affection and care that we can offer to other species. So there’s sexual desire; there’s just observation. There are moments in the poetry where she really unpacks the anthropocentric idea of the natural world. She’s very resistant to the idea of reading other species through our lens. She questions how we name them; she questions how we think we speak to other species. The title poem, ‘Significant Other,’ talks about a woman looking at a tortoise, and there’s this line: Did the creature ever think a thought her way? It really questions this idea of us being the centre of the universe. I think I tend to read a lot of very dreamy writing: lots of description. But Isabel’s book is incredibly precise and sharp in this way that, as a writer, fascinates me, because she’s able to distil a single species in a poem. It’s not ‘nature poetry’ in the sense of that being the only focus of her world. She jumps between suburban trees and creatures in the rainforest and the reality TV she hears through her neighbour’s walls. There’s so much in the poetry that bleeds our distinctions between nature and culture, but it also really forces this dislocation of the human from the centre. There definitely has been. Actually, when I was coming up with this list, I realised that a lot of what I was coming up with was poetry. When I think about new writers entering the field, many are coming by way of poetry. A lot of them actually aren’t yet at the stage where they have a full book I could put on this list. Yes, there’s a small press book, with a very limited print run, coming out soon by a writer named Pratyusha who we published in the Willowherb Review ‘s Epping Forest issue . Her new one is going to be called Bulbul Calling , published by Bitter Melon . Her debut pamphlet, Night Waters, was published by ZARF in 2018. Pratyusha writes so beautifully about nature. I’ve read her work on forests and birds and the ocean, and it’s incredibly powerful. Also, I should mention Nina Mingya Powles, who won this year’s Nan Shepherd Prize . I think she’s the most exciting writer among us right now. She runs Bitter Melon, the small press, and has published numerous works of poetry. She’s just published a food memoir called Tiny Moons —I did think actually about including this, because although it’s a food memoir, it’s so sensory. It’s so visceral. There’s such a strong sense of place that I would actually class this as place writing in many ways. She’s currently writing a book called Small Bodies of Water . Her work is just this incredible mix of nature writing and poetry and migration stories, with plays on language and identity. She’s from New Zealand and is of mixed white New Zealander and Malaysian/Chinese heritage, so she writes a lot about fluidity between places. There are a lot of writers right now who are producing incredible work that aren’t with mainstream presses yet or whose books haven’t already been released. I think the next few years are going to be just ground-breaking in terms of what nature writing has to offer. So I’m really excited to see that. I’d love to do this list again in five years’ time and look back at what has changed, because journals like amberflora and Caught by the River and Emergence are publishing really incredible work. If these writers go on to produce books, we are in great luck, I would say."