Tigress

Jessica Mookherjee, highly commended in the 2017 Forward Prizes, presents her second collection of poems, Tigress. Mixing myth, magic and migration, these poems explore the impact of choice upon our lives and concentrate their magnificent, kaleidoscopic imagination on the intricate and often fraught nature of childhood and family, selfhood and womanhood.
Fierce, often funny, always charged and revealing, Mookerjee's acute attention to detail tracks lives lived between Bengal, Wales and London. In exploring the intense displacement and loss that marks the experience of migration, the poems move into territories of danger and safety, illness and heartbreak, and ultimately into self-discovery; a rich and sensual moonlit menagerie of bears, big cats, wolves, and 'forest mothers'. At every step, Tigress is wildly inventive, elegant and utterly distinctive.

Jessica Mookherjee is a British poet of Bengali heritage and grew up in Wales and London, and now lives in Kent. She has been published in many journals and anthologies, and was twice highly commended for Best Single Poem in the Forward Prizes in 2017 and 2021. Author of three previous collections from Nine Arches Press, her second collection, Tigress, was shortlisted for the Ledbury Prize in 2021. She has two pamphlets, Playlists and Desire Lines with Broken Sleep Books. Jessica has a background in biological socio-ecology and public mental health. She also runs workshops and mentors poets.