Gaps by Jenny Danes

Gaps speaks about the gaps between two different languages and cultures, and questions how successfully love can bridge these. It’s also about uncomfortable spaces: the distance between your desired self and your true self, between anxiety and reality, between your body and another person’s body.

Jenny Danes was born in Chelmsford in 1995 and studies English Literature and German at Newcastle University. In 2013 and 2016 she was highly commended in the Bridport Prize for poetry and in 2016 she won The Poetry Business New Poets Prize. Her work has appeared in various magazines including The Rialto, Magma, The North, Brittle Star, The Missing Slate and The Cadaverine.

Gaps is full of anthropological, elegantly-crafted poems that stand back and take a good, hard look around the room, finding a fresh language for what they see: ‘darkness comes and holds me like a glove, / which, by next morning, is a fist’. Poems about moving countries, poems about love, poems about the gaps in language ... every subject is treated with clear-sighted confidence.

– Helen Mort

The publication of this pamphlet of moving and memorable poetry signals the arrival of an exciting new voice. Jenny Danes’ assured poems are rooted in language, love, displacement and, most of all, they are brimming with the undefinable emotional power that only poetry can convey.

– Stevie Ronnie