Inmates

A remarkably original young British poet—chosen as one of the most recent decade's Next Generation Poets—alongside Adam Foulds, Helen Mort, and Kate Tempest.

The poems of Inmates stage encounters with insects at sites and moments of their refuge, torpor, hatching, or fighting. These encounters occur as insects traverse a floor in the night, climb a wall, or face their death and decay—all in and around the house of the writer, with whom they are sharing time, as fellow inmates.

There is an urgency to these poems, emerging from the instant of their writing. The close attention Borodale brings to his observation of the natural world results in poems of real intensity. Inmates is an attempt to co-exist with the natural world—examining it, intimately, at the edge of language itself, where the human voice begins to break apart.