Lungs

'Ailsa Holland knows that being a woman is 'not for cissies'. Nor is it 'a circus of paints/ and nails and lashes and heels and tucks,/ it's just this body'. The cast of voices she assembles, from Ophelia to Mary Magdalene to Calliope to her dying mother know this too. It is about sex, salt, children, work, fatigue, bones and trilobites. To read it is to feel enlarged, capacious, full, not out, of breath. This is a book for everyone.' Anthony Wilson

'Poignant, irreverent, dark, funny and deeply thoughtful. 'Lungs' are breath, breath is life, and life is colourful, messy, painful, joyous, filled with people and with aloneness, seasoned with love and grief. Dancing between the mundane and the transcendent, there are goddesses, there is birth and death and oh so many questions, with playful lung-inspired images giving us a moment to pause and catch our breaths. Holland calls a poem 'the broken spoken'. Here it is not only spoken but sung, celebrated, breathed.' Tania Hershman

'Earthed in our everyday experiences and sometimes angry. Between poems of fossil song, crying with laughter, and fuckedupness, sit Ailsa Holland's photographs. Quietly crafted, these visual assemblages invite us to explore the materiality of respiration. For those wanting to find straight-ahead ways of spending their time, you can keep your shiny stuff. For all imps and menopausal mermaids, bring a cuppa and feel the love.' Jules Sprake