Naked Since Faversham by Alex Josephy

Alex Josephy lives half the year in Italy, and it shows: in her descriptions of the natural world, in the musical Italian vocabulary dotted throughout these poems, and in portraits of village life from a distinctly hot and sensual climate: "His cielo is yeast / that swells the heart // of a brioche, opens / rooms of warm air / in a bread roll." (A Word in Your Ear). But the British half of her life is also richly mined, with a history of the Thames, the story of a rag-and-bone mare dug up during building works, memories of Welsh grandparents, and some delightful miscellanea – a hospital theatre that doubles up as an aircraft, a jar of ashes abandoned in a pub, and the woman who throws her clothes out the window of the First Class section of Carriage 3 during rush hour...

“Alex Josephy’s new book of poems is an example of poetry’s gift – unpretentious, alert, buoyant, appreciative of small things, attentive to this and that: a life lived with care.”

- Maitreyabandhu

“This is a cracking collection. What a pleasure it has been to read it; there are lots of poems that I keep going back to. Alex Josephy has managed to be tender and witty and revelatory. She made me smile and then sad... then gave a gut punch. Some poems resonated really strongly. Basically too many to mention. Gorgeous.”

- Jane Kirwan