About the Book
Heart-breaking yet uplifting, this unforgettable portrait of an Anglo-Romani childhood on the edge of society, in and out of the perils of state care, marks the arrival of a vital new voice in British poetry
'Like amber, these poems capture moments of time, place and feeling' Lemn Sissay, author of My Name is Why
'An assured debut . . . It's not just the Dickensian narrative that's gripping , but the way it brings different forms to bear on its material' Guardian
'Don't worry, I'm here in the house where every room has a name, but children's names are often forgotten.'
Uplifting and heart-breaking, this lyrical evocation of an Anglo-Romani childhood marks the arrival of a vital new voice.
MINX reveals the vibrant but precarious world of a multi-racial Romani family- a world of grandfathers brewing moonshine in marrows, basement reggae parties, and a mother struggling to support her two daughters on the proceeds of her shadowy profession. Their powerful bond helps the sisters survive when they're taken into care, in a children's home that forcibly separates them.
With a verve and playfulness that belies their pain, these poems explore what it means to belong. Through daring experiments with form and narrative, MINX captures how it feels to grow up between a culture whose traditional ways are being lost and a wider society that despises them.
'Moving, magical, mesmerising, these poems stay with you long after the pages are closed' Jackie Kay, author of Fiere
About the Author :
Karen Downs-Barton is an Anglo-Romani writer who, after a peripatetic childhood including times in state care, now lives in Wiltshire. Winner of the Cosmo Davenport-Hines prize (2021) and Creative Future silver medallist (2022) she holds a PhD from King's College London, exploring identity through minority languages and multilingualism in entertainment industries. Her pamphlet Didicoy was published by the Poetry Business in 2023 and selected as a Poetry Book Society Choice that year.
Review :
‘Like amber, these poems capture moments of time, place and feeling which otherwise would be unseen and ignored. How are we to survive our memories if they are not held like this? Every one of us who are writers must document our time in care and outside of it. I found Minx heartbreaking. Downs-Barton warns, “Children who stay here become line drawings nobody / colours in.” It’s a line I will never forget. There are more’
‘Minx is a splinter of a book, something that interrupts the body. It's a beautiful violence, each page a shock of poetry that renders an underclass family vivid. Rich, delicate, and brutal, Minx is essential reading, a constant companion. Read it’
‘Minx by Karen Downs-Barton is a work of linguistic and formal daring, a poetry collection that inhabits the liminal spaces of identity with precision and verve. Through its incisive engagement with the Gypsy, Roma, and Traveller experience, the book interrogates cultural hybridity – half one, half the other – as both a fracture and a site of creative possibility. Downs-Barton’s unflinching diction dismantles the structures of racism and cultural erasure while interrogating the complex legacies of belonging and inheritance. “I practise the language my grandparents spoke,” she writes, reanimating tradition as an act of resistance and renewal. Minx is a vital contribution to contemporary poetics, a text that challenges, witnesses, and transforms with every line’
‘In Minx language itself is a character. No, language is a cast of characters. No, language is impossible, chimerical, composite, exceeding the mouths that try to shape or frame it. In Anglo-Romani language – and in Anglo-Romani identity – the Anglo and the Romani do not meet, they collide. By assimilation and by exclusion, Romani becomes the violently disavowed undersong of English. Romani haunts English, troubling that unhomely home, making it strange to itself, willing it into miraculous and alarming new shapes. ... While anyone with eyes to read might marvel at Minx for its formally inventive engagement with language; its sheer lyric verve (and swerve), some of us will carry it with us, an incantation against all that besets us'
‘Minx is a forceful collection that examines the intricacies of personhood, grief, and memory. These poems smoothly convey what’s it like to live between languages and histories. With striking, imaginative power, the collection deftly portrays how we navigate the territories of longing, while also finding moments of beauty and solace in the most unexpected places’
‘Karen Downs-Barton, to paraphrase from one of her poems in this electrifying collection, is adept at “adapting roaming forms.” As fascinated by language as lineage, these poems tell an often harrowing tale of a Romani girl's experience of the Care System, the School system, the Foster System. The girl who was so often forced into clothes which were not hers captures the free spirit of rebellion, questioning stereotypes and prejudice along the way. Moving, magical, mesmerising, these poems stay with you long after the pages are closed’
'Her poems are fiercely imaginative, formally innovative, and always explore new territory in the most candid and wonderfully unexpected ways'
‘Minx is a triumph: a mingling palaver of voices, a “swirling patrin”, a pattern bound by the force of Karen Downs-Barton's linguistic and narrative gifts. The systematic interlocking of state care, poverty and racial discrimination are brought into fresh, necessary light'
'Courageous, haunting and exquisitely appliquéd with the musicality of her own Romani identity, Downs-Barton examines a childhood traumatised by loss, poverty, sexism, and the brutality of the care home system. From the heart-rending ‘Of the Men who Came as Shadows in the Night’ to ‘Arriving at the Home for Crying Children’, these are poems of anguish and questioning, poems gathered into a linguistic feast that will leave you breathless'
'These poems are breathtaking. [Didicoy] is wonderfully peopled, with an unforgettable portrait of a mother and a powerful and important depiction of life in a children's home. Writing like this, which combines real expressive skill with material which must be expressed, really reminds us what poetry is for'
