Boom! is Carolyn Jess-Cooke’s second collection of poetry. It opens with the trope of the ‘baby as a hand grenade’ lobbed into the middle of a woman’s life, scattering all, this book goes on to explore the many dilemmas of modern motherhood, taking to task the clichés of the ‘working’ vs. ‘non-working’ mother and deliberately unbalancing the ‘work/life balance’. From free-verse riffs on essential moments of joy and blame, to artful sonnets on the physical impact of childbirth, to meditative and discursive pieces on the way that love for a child suffuses your being, this book is chock-full of the terrors and wonders of parenthood.
Carolyn Jess-Cooke was born in 1978 to a musical family in Belfast, Northern Ireland. She is an award-winning author of poems and novels for adults, as well as four non-fiction books in the areas of Shakespeare, cinema, and film sequels. Her first poetry collection, Inroads, won the Tyrone Guthrie Prize, an Eric Gregory Award from the Society of Authors, a Northern Promise Award, and was shortlisted for the New London Poetry Prize. Her bestselling novel, The Guardian Angel’s Journal, was published in 2011 in the UK & Commonwealth (Piatkus), USA (Guideposts), and in 19 other languages. Her new novel is The Boy Who Could See Demons.