Dear Sophie,                         
14th November

A sunspot
            sharpens a shadow on the gate
making me see
                          both shadow
                                                  and gate.

You sit on the old sofa.
The leather arms cool under your skin.

A sunspot
            through the yellow curtains
making me see
                            you
                                    are
                                            made of gold.

The weather changes.
Clouds
take away the gold
and the gate.

Can we talk about the dark that’s coming? 

Kirsten Luckins

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‘Dear Sophie, 14th November’ is copyright © Kirsten Luckins, 2021, and is reprinted here from Passerine (Bad Betty Press, 2021) by permission of Bad Betty Press. You can read more about the book and buy a copy from the press website.

Notes from Bad Betty Press:

In Passerine, Kirsten Luckins’ epistolary poems distill the daily process of grieving, healing, remembering, through nature’s wild and atomic industry. Reading this collection is like pressing your ear to the ground to hear the orchestra of the world: alive with buzzing hum and beating wing; death, all the while, lurking on the doorstep. The language is lush, tack-sharp and playful, capturing both the contradictions of being in and of the world, and the rare honesty of a true and fierce friendship. It’s this friendship that binds the collection: a golden thread of sunlight.

Find out more about Passerine on the Bad Betty website.

Kirsten Luckins is a poet, performer, and creative producer who lives on the North East coast, as close to the sea as possible. Her practice is centred on poetry but driven by playfulness, collaboration and experimentation, so encompasses film, collage and text art, performance and theatre-making. She has toured two award-nominated spoken word shows, and worked as dramaturg to many poets and projects, including the award-winning The Empathy Experiment. She is artistic director of the Tees Women Poets collective, and co-founder of the Celebrating Change digital storytelling project where she teaches creative memoir writing. Passerine is her third collection.

You can read more about Kirsten’s work on her website, and follow her on Twitter.

Bad Betty Press is an independent publisher of new poetry, born in 2017 and run by Amy Acre and Jake Wild Hall. Our authors include Gboyega Odubanjo, Anja Konig, Charlotte Geater, Susannah Dickey, Tanatsei Gambura, Matthew Haigh, Kirsten Luckins and Tom Bland. Our books include PBS Pamphlet Choices, Poetry School Books of the Year, a Telegraph Poetry Book of the Month, Laurel Prize longlistees and BAMB Readers Award shortlistees. We’ve been thrice shortlisted for the Michael Marks Publishers’ Award, named The Book Hive’s Indie Publisher of the Month, and described by The Big Issue as ‘the epitome of bold independence’. Find out more about our books here and follow Bad Betty on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.

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