Adventures in poetry
Flood
Jessica Mookherjee
ISBN: 978-1-916760-00-4
eISBN: 978-1-916760-01-1
Price: £11.99
Publication date: 12 December 2024
Format: Paperback / eBook
Territories: World
Extent: 72pp
DCF: Poetry Collections
In Flood, Jessica Mookherjee inhabits several identities in her ‘bone-framed coat’. With overarching themes of migration, otherness, sexual awakening, and maternal mental illness, we encounter the aftermath of catastrophe, of loss and being lost.
Here, ‘time folds us into origami boats’ – and the poems swell with the surging tides of youth and of becoming, of what we inherit and what we forge as our own path – and what happens when we jump into the depths and experience life in full-flow. Alive with wildlife and nightlife, mythmaking and bad romance, the everyday and the otherworldly, Flood is a prodigious debut collection from a truly distinctive and vital voice, now reissued in this new edition by Nine Arches Press.
Praise for Flood:
“Jessica Mookherjee’s Flood is an at-times overwhelming read. It is dense with the loss and longing of mothers, daughters and childless women who are nevertheless also both. This tremendously unified book demands to be read at a single sitting, and is a striking testament to a life lived – and survived.” – Fiona Sampson MBE
“The language of Jessica Mookherjee’s poems is vividly immediate, with its own rich culture, distinctive rhythms and striking imagery. The separate stories in the poems of Flood flow together into a single current, deep and powerful enough to evoke the experience of several lives.” – Susan Wicks
“In this collection, Jessica Mookherjee is a genuine virtuoso with a powerful original voice. She creates a vivid cosmos as, with verve, she cuts through façades, plunges into depths and shows a gutsy life on the edge of things. Wales, England, London, Bengal, India and elsewhere are woven with wondrous imagination and sharp, incisive imagery into the poems, all of which breathe and flow with a music all her own, exposing what it is to live and be brought up in our multi-cultural society. This is poetry worth noting.”– Patricia McCarthy
Jessica Mookherjee lives in Kent. Her work appears in many journals including Agenda, Poetry Wales, The North, Rialto, Under the Radar, Poetry Birmingham Literary Journal and in various anthologies including Bloodaxe’s Staying Human. She was highly commended in the 2017 and 2021 Forward Prizes for Best Single Poem. She is author of three full collections, inlcuding Tigress, (Nine Arches Press 2019) which was shortlisted for the Ledbury Munthe Prize for Best Second Collection in 2021.She is a joint editor of Against the Grain Poetry Press.
Notes from a Shipwreck, the third collection of poetry byJessica Mookherjee, is a richly detailed and illuminating voyage of dislocation and longing. By turns evocative, unsettling, and full of ‘small acts of magic’, Mookherjee simultaneously finds the past, present, and future in the tempestuous, lyrical tides that flow through her poems.
Find out more about Notes From A Shipwreck
The Nine Arches Press blog features poems from many of our poets, as well as interviews and articles.