Kate Davis writes magical realist poems born of the hills, marshes and coastal edgelands of south Cumbria.
In this remarkable first collection, tarns, limekilns and abandoned pits become portals into a dark, interior world. A woman levitates above a building site; earth slips and fault-lines open up beneath the town; the sea hides ‘a gob of virus’. The moving title sequence tells the story of a young girl with polio who struggles to find her feet - and her voice - in an unforgiving landscape where ‘the ground cannot be trusted’.
Alive to geology, memory and myth, The Girl Who Forgets How to Walk is a brave, uncompromising and unmissable debut.
