Released 15 July 2023 // Poetry Pamphlet // 36 pages
“cactus land is a sharp, wilful collection of confession and poesy that sticks inside you. This collection is as personally devastating as it is defiant to false praise, prophets, profit. If you’ve read Briony Collins (my favourite living poet) before, you’ll comprehend this metaphor of picking at the splinters she sneaks inside your psyche. More fitting to her infinite pools of empathy and perception is that, through her pain as enduring pariah, she tweezers splinters from you that she never set there. Each line of this exposé of self-realisation reveals a sovereign soul parched by the expectations of society-baked partnership. Collins is the colloquial commander of inquisitive cognisance, dualistic gratitude, and translating muffled pleasure and humane terror into words and stanzas and symbols. Poetry exists to wring out whispers. Collins, like a scorched land of cacti, endures. A survivor of all weathers, all gods, all men.”
– Aaron Farrell, author of ArtBeat
cactus land – Briony Collins
Briony Collins is a widely published writer from North Wales. She won the 2016 Exeter Novel Prize, was the 2020 Runner-Up for the Danby Prize, and has two Pushcart Prize nominations. Her books, Blame it on Me (2021), All That Glisters (2022), and The Birds, The Rabbits, The Trees (2023) are published by Broken Sleep Books. She also has a mini-pamphlet, Whisper Network, written with Caleb Nichols and funded by Bangor University. Later this year, she will release cactus land with her own press, Atomic Bohemian. Briony manages her time between running Cape Magazine, working on her PhD, and lecturing in English Literature and Linguistics.