Released 29 August 2025 // Poetry Pamphlet // 40 pages
‘I Know Where the Pelicans Go is at once fierce and playful, engaging myth, biology, grief and gender with sublime emotional honesty. The palpable inventiveness in her earlier poetics sings, and cuts in even more startling and unsettling ways in this new pamphlet by Briony Collins.
Collins weaves a visceral and arresting thread with memory, trauma, tenderness and transformation through the haunting image of the pelican, a creature both sacred and savage. The poems delve into fractured families, inherited violence, and fragile rebirths, where fatherhood is a storm, childhood a bruise, and love an unmaking. With documentary precision, the poems transform bodies into birds, grief into melody, and silence into storm. From the grotesque beauty of ‘Fabergé Suicide’ to the aching vulnerability of ‘Juno’ and the quietly devastating ‘Poem to tell my husband I’ve updated my will,’ this is poetry that sheds feathers, muscle, memory. I Know Where the Pelicans Go is a soaring, unflinching meditation on survival, inheritance, and the strange, sacred rituals of becoming human.’
— Taz Rahman, poet and author of East of the Sun, West of the Moon
‘This is an assured collection, visceral and meditative, exploring grief, emotional inheritance, and familial reinvention. I Know Where the Pelicans Go skewers myth and memory with lyrical and at times haunting lines. Briony Collins offers us a dissection of fatherhood, trauma, and transformation, as we follow the journey of the Pelicans, each of us flying as ‘an unleashed arrow catapulted across the sea’.’
— JP Seabright, poet and author of White Cloud Over Purple
‘Collins writes with a precision that refuses to decorate and an economy that gives every line weight. I Know Where the Pelicans Go belongs to a moment where vulnerability is commodified and sentiment is cheap. Collins refuses both, offering instead what’s left standing after sentiment is done.’
— Alan Parry, EIC of The Broken Spine and author of Peeling Apples
