New Voices First Pamphlet Award winner 2022
Katherine Parsons‘ first collection, Little Intimacy, was published as a pamphlet by Frosted Fire in September 2022. As an award winner, Katherine will receive 50 free copies of her book, and royalties on all books sold after that. She will also be invited to act as a triage judge for the New Voices 2023 competition, reading entries and considering them for a longlist of potential winners.
If you wish to buy a copy of this remarkable book, you can order it here.
Katherine is a PhD candidate at the University of Birmingham, where she specializes in conceptions of memory in contemporary literature. Her poetry is often a sketching out of love and what it means to live. Katherine was Guest Editor in wildfire words submission window On The Same Page. She is also a judge for our Flash Fiction 150 competition.
An endorsement of Little Intimacy
Love in all its colours and shapes is explored in Katherine Parsons’ dexterous and richly lyrical Little Intimacy, a pamphlet that carries the reader along in a heady rush. The energy doesn’t abate for a moment as we follow love from the passion of “Rouen” (We are Paris/and the streets of us/crumble and touch/and shiver at the smoke of us), through the sensual vulnerability of “Plum-lover” (You, too, have a bruise I want to press my thumb into) and right through to the domestic yet transcendent “Marginalia” (we took time/even with dinner burning,/even with me stressed as hell/about dinner burning/To dance a little). This is a startling and clear-eyed collection from a promising poet who knows how to make music from it all; from the prosaic, romantic, the starry sky and the kitchen sink.
Anna Saunders, Founding Director, Cheltenham Poetry Festival
Poems from Little Intimacy
Five sample poems from Little Intimacy are below, each with an audio recording of Katherine reading it.
Dear Honey Lover
When I call you honey
I don’t mean the taste of it to a tongue
the thick smooth stick of it
nor your glottal softness
and I don’t mean
what people mean
when they say music is honey
full of gold and gentle
and nothing at all like honey, really
I don’t even mean to invoke bees
and their majestic twelfth of a spoonful
but the way you make it run
and spill and pour
over oats I made too sweet already
squeezing the bottle
and letting it breathe
just to see
On Being
THIS IS HERE BECAUSE I PUT IT HERE
says handprint in fingerpaint
says flag on moon
says fist in face
says schoolgirl experimenting with autonomy
by placing a pencil on the edge of her pencil case
because she can
and because when she does so it stays
and until she is made to tidy it away
she watches its existence persist against
the boredom of an endless day:
a pencil! resting against her pencil case!
for no reason but to remain
and by remaining say
THIS IS HERE BECAUSE I PUT IT HERE
and so she puts it here
and so says the rapist
and so says Jimmy fucking Neutron
and while we are talking about who put what where and why
this is also what I imagine the postwoman says
on the odd morning with pride
as she lands a ‘whistl’-marked letter on my doorstep
this is both what and why
and when we draw letters in lovehearts in the sand and say
‘this is here because I love you’
it is really here because I put it here because I love you
or else when the tide comes in and I still love you it would not leave
and so I will not say
I am here because I love you
Icebreaker
Let me hook your barbed heart
with a hook fish out the right hook: a fist:
unhook the last defences left: the stitch of lip to lip:
let me sift through your open throat
with a sieve lift out the chaff: the grain unfit for this
which sits below your thunder tongue
unspoken.
Let me lift the heavy weight of your hesitant thumb
levitating above words done, undone,
undo the list of things once done, unspoken,
and under this tenderly my fishhook fumble
will first tip into and then split lip from lip
then lift into the flesh of your cheek:
speak. Forgive me my cruelty as I
forgive those who cruelty against me
as I, surgeon, slip this thing
into your burden, slicing as it slides under
and then into
and then right through its target: it’s you:
your penetrable skin the ire of the grabber machine
and the ballpoint pen.
Baitless, I begin to retreat:
in better light I believe
I might have more luck with your open eye
which, of course, is when and why you
begin to move—soundlessly at first, and then
soundlessly still—mouth over the metal
and swallow it whole.
What I Have Forgotten
How you soften
when you say I love you
and I love you so much
In the Evening
By the time I finished the balloons
all five feet one and three-quarters of you
had laid claim to the bed
necessitating that I
dangling over the edge
should lay my leg against your leg
warm and scandalous
ankle to ankle and
I know it’s nothing
I know, but
it is holy
to feel my heat and your heat
and your skin in my sheets
and my skin and yours meet
and sleeping suddenly be easy again
full of dreams
and waking
I hope
will be slow
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