The second collection from poet, sonic artist and filmmaker Fiona Curran – Never Try to Outswim a Bear – is a stunning combination of dark humour, grief, nature, botany and science: Reflecting on art, love lost and found, and the poetry of place and displacement – from where she sends us knowing postcards. Within these pages, Curran captures fleeting moments and momentous events as so many impressions caught in the corner of an eye. Her work resonates with those who are alive to their own burning experiences. These poems are a curveball. Catch and propel them forward, on fire with your own thoughts.
“If Fiona Curran’s Never Try to Outswim a Bear reincarnated as a canvas of earthly delights in every vividly ornate corner you’d find a woman, unsurprised as a prophet, observing an inner landscape of literary, painterly and cinematic scenes of lust, love and betrayal with limitless candour. Her sharp wisdom is hard-won; her language plunges itself into the dark earth then waves its roots in the air like victory.” – Sandeep Parmar
“Fiona Curran is a bold northern voice. She introduces us to her world through the urbane and the rural, the scientific and the mystific: from the decadence of her Florentine lovers to the patience of an 18th century milkmaid. I like Fiona’s poems because she writes about real people who truly exist and whose lives and loves I can believe in.” – Wilton Carhoot, editor of The Slab