Really Not Really by Fee Griffin Broken Sleep Books

Brimming with humor, wistfulness and awe, Really Not Really invites the reader to reconsider everything they thought they understood about the ordinary: to see, if only for a moment, what we’re missing. From the everyday to the fantastic, Fee Griffin leads the reader from the edge of what’s familiar, and what’s possible, into our deeper perceptions and inner realms. Like a funhouse of life, these poems are whimsical, thought-provoking, and sometimes dark. This collection is an invitation to a more inclusive, intuitive, understanding of ourselves, and what we are, really (not really).

PRAISE for Really Not Really:

After For Work/For TV – her extraordinary debut collection and dazzling love letter to the kings and queens of factory canteens, workshops, and bus stops – Griffin continues her interrogations of life’s delicate structures with formal agility, tonal virtuosity, and imagistic subtlety. In Really Not Really, her second collection, she proves yet again her ability to capture the unremarkable as a reminder of our need for constant reflection and (re)discovery of not only ourselves, but the realities that shape our lives. And when she writes that no matter how “long the world lasts / it is better to have three mushrooms than two,” she doesn’t write as a poet – she writes as a philosopher, a magician, and a sage. In short, Griffin has a voice, imagination, and linguistic dexterity like no other poet writing today, and Really Not Really is simply a brilliant sophomore collection by a poet who shines on and off the page.

   — Daniele Pantano, Home for Difficult Children

To read Really Not Really is to climb inside the body of someone who sees and feels the world in all of its kaleidoscopic disparity, its bizarre and surreal absurdness. And yet this collection of beautifully crafted poems makes complete sense. Sense, in the way it calls into question our daily lives, the HOW! HOW! HOW! of our strange existence. Every sentence is another layer of earth giving way beneath our feet, every page a Pandora’s box begging to opened. As we fall down the rabbit hole we practice funerals, drive in haunted cars, stand aghast at the size of the ocean. This is poetry that uncovers the hidden, of internal human anxiety, the crushing external weight of our mortality. And yet to say all this is really an injustice at the brilliance of Griffin’s observations , and this exceptional book is much much more than can adequately be explained in just three simple dimensions.

   — Stuart McPherson, End Ceremonies

Fee Griffin’s Really Not Really is a breakneck descent into wry wit. These poems are fresh and full zesty surrealism, written in a voice that is lively and engaging, treats you like a confidante, tells you tall tales you are too charmed to not believe.
— Cathleen Allyn Conway, Bloofer

ABOUT Fee Griffin:

Fee Griffin is a writer from the east coast of England. Her debut poetry collection, For Work/For TV, won the Amsterdam Open Book Prize and was published by Versal Editions in 2020. She works at the University of Lincoln with some amazing colleagues and students, whose work inspires her. She rides a beautiful orange wheelchair at obnoxiously high speed and lives with her husband, four children and a dog from the Carpathian Mountains. She likes them all very much.

Broken Sleep Books