I Think We’re Alone Now

I Think We're Alone Now is a bold and far-ranging second collection from a fresh and original new voice in British poetry. This was supposed to be a book about intimacy: what it might look like in solitude, in partnership, and in terms of collective responsibility. Instead, the poems are preoccupied with pop music, etymology, surveillance equipment and cervical examination, church architecture and beetles. Just about anything, in fact, except what intimacy is or looks like. So this is a book that runs on failure, and also a book about failures: of language to do what we want, of connection to be meaningful or mutual, and of the analytic approach to say anything useful about what we are to one another. Here are abrupt estrangements and errors of translation, frustrations and ellipses, failed investigations. And beetles. Abigail Parry's first collection, Jinx (Bloodaxe Books, 2018), was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection 2018 and the Seamus Heaney Centre First Collection Poetry Prize 2019. I Think We're Alone Now wasshortlisted for the 2023 T.S. Eliot Prize and for theEnglish-language Poetry Award (Wales Book of the Year Award 2024).

Table of Contents:
11 The brain of the rat in stereotaxic space 12 Speculum 14 Axonometric 16 In the dream of the cold restaurant 18 The Swords 20 Set piece with mackerel and seal MARGINAL GLOSSES 24 English-speaking learners 25 English-speaking learners 26 English-speaking learners 27 English-speaking learners COVERS 31 I Think We’re Alone Now 32 Les jeux 34 Whatever happened to Rosemarie? 35 It is the lark that sings so out of tune 37 Lore 39 Audio commentary COMPLICATIONS 45 The Fly Dressers’ Guide 46 Intentional complications 49 Giallo 50 Muse 51 The true story of your own death 55 A fine distinction 56 All the blues 58 Rune poem for a funeral 60 Some remarks on the General Theory of Relativity 62 A beetle in a box 67 Ghost story in the subjunctive 69 Oversight THE SQUINT 71 The Squint 83 Sparks

About the Author :
Abigail Parry spent seven years as a toymaker before completing her doctoral thesis on wordplay. Her poems have been set to music, translated into Spanish and Japanese, broadcast on BBC and RT Radio, and widely published in journals and anthologies. She has won a number of prizes and awards for her work, including the Ballymaloe Prize, the Troubadour Prize, and an Eric Gregory Award. Her first collection, Jinx, published by Bloodaxe Books in 2018, was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection 2018 and the Seamus Heaney Centre First Collection Poetry Prize 2019. Her second collection, I Think We're Alone Now, (Bloodaxe Books, 2023) was shortlisted for the 2023 T.S. Eliot Prize. She is currently a lecturer in creative writing at Cardiff University.

Review :
These are outstanding poems: constructed like a collection of beautifully made, trick, locked boxes, they are innovative, complex, and lush in their language and texture. In an explosion of gaming we find in the poems etymological digging, rare words, number games, anagrams, hidden shapes – as well as a range of experiments in traditional and contemporary form. This is poetry con brio, ambitious, far-reaching, but using disguise to tell hidden stories of emotion and pain. Abigail Parry, in her first collection, Jinx, performs twists and turns on playground games, ghost lore, cantrips and myths; the poems strike deep on matters of love and pleasure, sex and risk, as well as dazzle with their antic wit and control. Abigail Parry brings a trickster’s delight in instability, not just to the old themes of innocence and experience, but to the shadowed and less commonly charted regions that lie between. Her poems move, and change, rapidly and headily, with a musical springiness that never flags and is all her own. Jinx is an abundant, exuberant, unsolemnly wise, and wholly beguiling first book that marks Parry out as the pace-setter of her generation. With macabre wit and a gothic sense of romance, Jinx returns obsessively to a handful of images. It gives the collection a singular and cohesive vision, while also turning it into a claustrophobic, repetitive nightmare. It may not be to everyone’s taste. For this reader, it was electrifying... Jinx is a charming collection. Read it at your peril.