- English
- ePUB (mobile friendly)
- Available on iOS & Android
What are You After?
About This Book
"There is no tick box for this poem. This poem grew up on benefits. This poem pays higher rate tax. This poem isn't in an anthology. This poem doesn't have a glottal stop."
Josephine Corcoran's inventive and unflinching debut poetry collection asks us to consider what it is we're really here for. Bold and unsentimental, her remarkable poems trace the lifelines of where we've been and where we're going to, and they aren't afraid to ask difficult questions of where we are now, either. Corcoran's dexterity allows her to get under the skin of each poem, and to explore other lives with the same attentiveness and concision she brings to her own experiences. What Are You After is also fearlessly personal and political; these resolute poems celebrate outspoken women, working class and immigrant lives, and they refuse to look away from the harsh realities of inequality, austerity, and poverty. Throughout, the haunting texture of history, of long gone places and lost voices, is discernible just beneath the surface of the everyday present like a mirror's delicate silvering. These poems are a rare gift; tender, incisive and real.
Frequently asked questions
Information
Table of contents
- Cover
- Title Page
- Copyright
- Contents
- Dedication
- Honeymoon
- Dream while losing twins
- Supermoon, September 2014
- Esther and Ezekiel
- Mis/Carriage
- A dream while pregnant
- What are you after?
- Working Class Poem
- Confession
- Then sometimes we’ll think of Southport
- Dreaming while bereaved
- Sometimes I think about Red Rum
- Indian Summer, 1980
- The domestic life of young film lovers
- How to keep spare keys
- A dream about Martin Scorsese
- Our son the assassin
- Telephony
- One on almost every street
- Like the back of my hand
- The Extraordinary Jubilee of Mercy
- “Police Say Sorry”
- Stephen Lawrence isn’t on the national curriculum
- Reading Harry Potter to my daughter
- In Privet Drive
- Obliviate
- Winter in the town of three smells
- Psychologies of Economy Ham
- Torrential
- Meeting Ibaa
- Poem in which we hear the word ‘drone’.
- Exquisite Corpse
- Three Ted Hughes Stories
- Daydreaming on a beach in Brittany
- Speaking French
- Poem in which I am Joséphine in Paris
- Fallen asleep by a Christmas Tree on New Year’s Eve
- Ramshackle wooden structure in the far, far distance
- Old Girls
- What becomes of the absent-minded?
- Falling in love while watching The Godfather
- Thanks for not switching me off
- History Lesson
- Gavrilo
- In a room of large-scale charcoal self-portraits by Anita Taylor
- In town for a funeral, we drive past our old house and see it is for sale
- The summer after Tamir Rice died
- Love in the time of hospital visits
- Acknowledgements and Thanks
- About the author & this book
- About the Author: