Apricot is
a devastating debut from one of the UK’s brightest and most fascinating poets,
written with the urgency of someone who knows they might not make it
through the weekend. Katie O’Pray’s is a highly articulate poetics, kicking
against the language of convention that would seek to limit us. The
improvisational vocabulary at play here engenders both a developed identity and
a young identity continuously being made, as each section of the book subverts
the questions of mental health practitioners with wisdom and panache. These
poems do not just concern the violence of gender, of sexuality, of disability,
of addiction, they reinvigorate how these violences can be understood. This is
a collection of singular quality.