Nine Arches Press
Adventures in poetry
Space Baby
Suzannah Evans
ISBN: 9781913437381
eISBN: 9781913437398
Price: £9.99
Publication date: 9th June 2022
Format: Paperback
Extent: 72pp
DCF: Poetry Collections
Cover artwork by Ayham Jabr
Space Baby, the second collection by Suzannah Evans, asks difficult questions about the Earth, its beings, and what lies ahead for them; how do we look to the future on a planet that’s burning? How do we come to terms with our grief, and what can we believe in? If the human race destroys what we have, where will we go?
In this dystopian, searching book, Evans skilfully mixes absurdity and wit with speculative, and serious themes. Here, we encounter artificial intelligence and robots that will ‘cuddle you to sleep’, the melting permafrost and all the surprises it reveals, as well as the very first human baby born in space. Ultimately, Evans writes to acknowledge our responsibilities and interconnectedness with earth and all its lifeforms, as well as to our future generations. These are vivid, prescient poems of existence, and survival, which ask how we can still find joy on a ruined planet.
Praise for Space Baby:
"Reading Suzannah Evans is like scuba diving in a twilight coral reef with an underwater fluorescence torch strapped to your head. It’s immersive and dangerous and you’re not quite the same once you resurface." - Caroline Bird
“I often find myself racing to the ends of things” writes Suzannah Evans in one poem - in this dazzling and inventive collection, we get to glimpse all we stand to lose in the impending climate catastrophe as well as what might be hovering just beyond ourselves, out of reach, in deep space” - Andrew McMillan
"Only Suzannah Evans can bring together extinct pigeons, duvet days and the whole hulking universe to reflect the absurdity of our contemporary moment. At once companionable and delusion-shattering, Space Baby is a bold and brilliant follow-up to Near Future." - Isabel Galleymore
Suzannah Evans is a poet, creative writing tutor and editor based in Sheffield. Her poetry has been widely published in magazines including Magma, The Rialto, The North, Poetry Review, Butcher's Dog, Poetry Wales and The Guardian's Poem of The Week.
Her debut collection Near Future was published by Nine Arches Press in November 2018. Suzannah was the winner of a Gladstone’s Library residency for this book and spent a month living and writing at the library in 2019. In 2021 she received a Northern Writers’ Award for her work-in-progress collection Space Baby, awarded by Andrew McMillan.
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Suzannah Evans’ debut collection Near Future is doom-pop-poetry with an apocalyptic edge, a darkly humorous journey through sci-fi lullabies and northern mysteries. This is a future simulation stripped of the space-age gloss of progression - one where the robots have gone rogue and the hopes of a new millennium are malfunctioning; a skewed yet oddly familiar world gone uncannily wrong.
The Nine Arches Press blog features poems from many of our poets, as well as interviews and articles.
