Arthropod by Lydia Unsworth

Lydia Unsworth's Arthropod bursts open with 'Starlight Express', a long prose poem about protection and harm, containing cannibal flowers, lecherous men, and family dynamics as constellatory and atomised as the poem. Like Selima Hill, Will Harris and Caroline Bird, Unsworth's images and associations are seductive with crystallised mystery - 'Knowing is holding a field in your palm'. At its dense core, the collection orbits a divorce and single motherhood oscillating between clinical, declarative registers and a nuclear facility for metaphor. There is a philosophical drive to Unsworth's questioning ('18a. If this, then that. / 18b. If that, then rupture.') as strange occurrences happen to an alien speaker in a foreign land. Arthropod's candour startles - how 'Finding a nest is almost always an act of transgression' - yet one cannot and should not look away from this alarmingly consequential collection, where 'every comma [is] glut with assembly'.

- Tom Branfoot