Two extraordinary collections of poetry will be launched in this dazzling evening event.

Much With Body is Polly Atkin’s startlingly original second collection. The beauty of the Lake District is both balm and mirror, refracting pain and also soothing it with distraction. Much of the landscape is lakescape, giving the book a watery feel, the author’s wild swimming being just one kind of immersion. Here the natural world is revered with an uneasy awe, contingent upon knowledge of our fragility and mortality.

‘This is serious play indeed’ - Vahni Capildeo

All The Men I Never Married is Kim Moore's eagerly awaited second collection. It is pointedly feminist, challenging and keenly aware of the contradictions and complexities of desire. The numbered poems take us through a gallery of exes and significant others where we encounter rage, pain, guilt and love. A powerful collection of deeply thoughtful and deeply felt poetry.

‘This book is a revolutionary and subversive requisition of the female gaze, and it will be canonical’ - Fiona Benson

Polly Atkin lives in Cumbria. Her first poetry collection Basic Nest Architecture appeared in 2017 and was longlisted for the Michael Murphy Memorial Prize. She is also the author of a number of pamphlets including Shadow Dispatches (Seren) which won the Mslexia Pamphlet prize and a biography Recovering Dorothy: The Hidden Life of Dorothy Wordsworth (Saraband, 2021). She is working on a memoir exploring place, belonging and disability.

Kim Moore lives and works in Cumbria. Her first full-length collection The Art of Falling (Seren, 2015) won the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize. She also won a New Writing North Award, an Eric Gregory Award and the Geoffrey Dearmer Prize. In 2020 she was a judge for the National Poetry Competition and the Forward prizes. She is part of Versopolis, a European-funded scheme to promote poets at festivals across Europe. She has a doctorate from Manchester Metropolitan University and is co-director of the Kendal Poetry Festival. Earlier this year she led Litfest’s New Writing Northwest poetry workshop.

Poetry Double Bill - Polly Atkin & Kim Moore