Released 29 October 2025 // Poetry Pamphlet // 67 pages
'This Savage Language by Emma Filtness is a thing of wonder and great beauty. Using the erasure technique on selected pages of Wuthering Heights, Emma has reduced the already wondrous prose into its stillest, most crystalline residues. These moments in time and space are delicate portals into the ecosystem of the original novel. What we are left with are spots of colour, moments of magic, voices from the great beyond.'
– Richard Skinner
'This Savage Language is a glorious explosion of gothic wonder and terror crafted via the careful tools of erasure poetry; a twenty-first century adaptation of Victorian romance turned monstrous. Filtness skilfully captures Brönte’s windy moors; the destructive passion between Catherine and Heathcliff; and the sermons of hellfire raging from the Yorkshire church pulpit. What is perhaps most striking about these poems, however, is their rapt attention to human fragility, our precarious survival within a world of destructive forces.'
– Emily Horton
'In This Savage Language, Emma Filtness performs a feat of impressive linguistic transformation, sensitively and skilfully drawing out thrilling new meaning and a compelling musicality from Brontë’s original text. Steeped in feeling and atmosphere, alive with weather and whispers, these elegant, spell-like poems lack none of Wuthering Heights’ gothic power, ‘the storm magic and heaving’, every page ‘sparkling / full of promise’.'
– Sarah Doyle
This Savage Language - Emma Filtness
Dr Em Filtness is a poet and senior lecturer in Creative Writing at Brunel University of London. Em works primarily in found and visual poetics. Bandaged Dreams, an erasure poetry sequence made from Lawrence Durrell's Justine, is out now with Broken Sleep Books, and The Venus Atmosphere, a full-colour collection of cosmic collage poems, is available from Steel Incisors.
Follow Em on Instagram and other social media platforms: @em_filtness