Monica's Overcoat of Flesh

This remarkable debut collection from Geraldine Clarksoncontains the uncontainable; wondrous, spellbound and daring poems, happy to roam from South American monasteries to the shorelines of memory. These bold, often witty and always hawk-eyed poems survey matters of faith, tragedy and womanhood.
Elaborate, skilful and formally audacious, Clarkson is a poet of extraordinary and kaleidoscopic vision; her writing always richly riotous with detail, her poems possessing the singular ability to move from the maelstrom of feeling to the stilled moment with an assured, quick elegance.
"The speaker of these poems is endlessly morphable and endlessly verbal; she can say anything and beguile us into listening: put our screens down and really listen and come to life again in the garden of her diction, her memory, her weird unassailable vision." – Kathleen Ossip
"... one of the finest contemporary practitioners of the prose poem. A mind-rattling, heart-shaking debut." – A.B. Jackson

Geraldine Clarkson lives in Warwickshire and is the author of three poetry pamphlets, including a Laureate's Choice and a Poetry Book Society Pamphlet choice. She has won the Poetry London and Ambit competitions, as well as the Magma Editors' and Anne Born prizes, and has been commended in the National Poetry, Arvon, and Mslexia competitions. Her poems have been published widely in UK journals including The Poetry Review and The Rialto, in anthologies such as Best British Poetry (Salt, 2014), Best New British and Irish Poets (Eyewear Books, 2018) and The Valley Press Anthology of Prose Poetry, 2019. Geraldine has spent many years involved in teaching refugees and migrants, as well as in admin, secretarial, office-cleaning, library, and care work, and her writing is influenced by her Irish roots and a formative period spent in a silent monastic order, including some years in South America.