In The Telling Julia Webb turns her forensic eye on what makes us human, with distinctive and acutely observed poems that unravel the intricacies at the heart of relationships. Full of taut poems about wreckage and survivors, Webb’s poetry focusses on families, parenthood, class, childhood, love, loss and identity, often adopting dark fairy tale imagery that echoes the writing of Angela Carter.

“Images writhe and fracture on the page, in her quest to portray a dysfunctional family… She reaches beyond the fracture lines, with a restless and playful vision… This is a brave and scrupulous collection, a mirror to our times and the familial sources of conflict” Pascale Petit. 

Caroline Bird describes the collection as “Swarming with buzzing sadness, peopled loneliness, and technicolour hauntings.”

'I found myself in these poems; know their streets and forest pathways and felt their dangers as a visceral ache.' Helen Ivory

'Threat knows how closely love and loss, comedy and tragedy, violence and sexuality can be bound together within the tight confines of a poem.' Andrew McMillan

‘Tensions simmer in poems of startling physicality, where the body’s desires and rages make their – sometimes brutal – presence felt.” Esther Morgan

“We is in the bank” won the 2018 Battered Moons poetry competition.

Threat was finished with the aid of a grant from Arts Council England.

'All is strange or estranged in fact, but it is articulated in poems of supple inventive concentration. In that sense Bird Sisters is a book that casts deep shadows.' George Szirtes

‘Glittering and shadowy, the ‘magic’ of this first collection is anchored in the ‘real’ of nylon sheets, a rented TV, Thetford Forest... Its language is spare and supple, wry, and can stun…” Moniza Alvi

The title sequence “Sisters” was highly commended in the 2016 Forward Prize.

Bird Sisters was developed with a grant from Arts Council England.