Our Collection for July 24. Reasons why we chose this title: We've loved having Caroline Bird with us at VERVE festival in Birmingham, first to launch the brilliant Air Year and second to judge our annual competition, this time on the theme of Beginnings. Both times, Caroline has run brilliant workshops for us too. She is a pleasure to work with. Ambush At Still Lake is a wonderful addition to her burgeoning backlist of books, as energetic, as surprising, as full of life and threat as you could possibly hope. Our Collection of the Month will ALWAYS be a book that we absolutely LOVE. This IS one!
 
OFFICIAL BLURB: Caroline Bird's new poems show us the ambush of real life that occurs in the stillness after the happy ending. This is a collection about marriage, lesbian parenthood, addiction and recovery in which a recurring dream is playing out: a world where mums impale themselves on pogo-sticks, serial killers rattle around in basements, baby monitors are haunted by someone else's baby and, through it all, love stays and stays like a stationary rollercoaster that turns out to be the scariest, most thrilling ride in the amusement park. Her editor welcomed the book in these terms: 'It is bleak, repellent and hilarious in an American Psycho-ish way.
 
Hectic and vivid.''Vegetable crisps. The words yawn like a black hole,sucking my eyes backwardsinto my head until I seemy own brain glowinglike a radioactive cauliflower.'
 
Ambush at Still Lake is Our Collection for July.
 
Caroline Bird has seven previous volumes published by Carcanet. Her sixth collection, The Air Year, won the Forward Prize for Best Collection 2020 and was shortlisted for the Polari Prize and the Costa Prize. Her fifth collection, In These Days of Prohibition, was shortlisted for the 2017 TS Eliot Prize and the Ted Hughes Award. A two-time winner of the Foyles Young Poets Award, her first collection Looking Through Letterboxes was published in 2002 when she was 15. She won an Eric Gregory Award in 2002 and was shortlisted for the Geoffrey Dearmer Prize in 2001 and the Dylan Thomas Prize in 2008 and 2010. She was one of the five official poets at the 2012 London Olympics.  In 2023, she won a Cholmondeley Award. Her Selected Poems, Rookie, was published in 2022.