Bathypelagia

Bathypelagia was shortlisted for the Five Islands Poetry Prize 2025.

Roughly 1000 to 4000 metres below sea level lies the bathypelagic (also known as the 'midnight') zone. No sunlight penetrates these depths. It's a constant 4 degrees Celsius and water pressure reaches 680 kilograms per square centimetre. The creatures who inhabit this zone are often transparent, moving minimally to conserve energy, carrying out their bioluminescent lives under the ocean's crushing weight. Bathypelagia is an imaginary space, a miniature sea. It's a viscous metaphor and an internal state. Lying awake at 3 a.m., it's the menagerie of quietly fraught voices you might hear in those small hours. Here, the lines are blurred between lover and predator, nurture and survival, between the intimate and the strange (and estranged). Distances aren't always easy to judge, and migration is more likely to be vertical. But under the cover of darkness, tender moments also find refuge.

These poems were written over a long and discontinuous period, starting about 15 years ago. Back then, I snorkelled and scuba-dived regularly. Some of my most alive experiences have been drifting underwater, without words. Equally, many of them have been when I'm suspended inside a poem.

This is a book of encounters. Some of them have human hands, some fins, and yet others, tentacles. Some even beat with three hearts. If you draw a long breath, kick down into the gloom, and hold very still, these poems, I hope, will swim a little closer.

Bathypelagia is a wonder of animacy and transformation. Cannily constructed in three zones, this book criss-crosses between the still-barely known zones of our oceans, the resemblances of domestic life—particularly of motherhood—and the deepest domains of myth and sea creatures. These poems weave together motifs across pages, making connections—aquatic, airy, subterranean—that astonish. – Kate Middleton

Bathypelagia is a powerful, memorable collection whose poems fluoresce with an otherworldly light, drawing us in. Debbie Lim's vivid, richly imagistic poems find illumination in the ocean's claustrophobic midnight zone, paying close and artful attention to the creatures inhabiting a region largely untouched by humans. – Sarah Holland-Batt