Threat by Julia Webb Nine Arches

This second collection by poet Julia Webb; forensically detailed and disturbing, the dark and sometimes brutal undertow of small town lives seeps to the surface of these unsettling poems.

“Threat is a powerful and unsettling telling of how it feels to be a girl living in small town whose surfaces are seethed with graffiti, and home life bristles with disquiet. A girl whose body grows into a woman’s shape and becomes instant prey to the lurkers in bars and those who snuffle the playgrounds with bags of hot chips. Julia Webb’s voice here is magical realism at its most gritty, full of loss and longing. I found myself in these poems; know their streets and forest pathways and felt their dangers as a visceral ache.” – Helen Ivory

“Threat is a collection which brilliantly manages to be both surreal and of the body; it’s a reminder that within the perfect metaphor can live a depth of truth that ordinary language might not be able to discover. Threatknows how closely love and loss, comedy and tragedy, violence and sexuality can be bound together within the tight confines of a poem.” – Andrew McMillan

“In Julia Webb’s audacious new collection the past is as claustrophobic as one of the cramped houses she so vividly describes, where families are cooped up together in dangerous proximity. Tensions simmer in poems of startling physicality, where the body’s desires and rages make their – sometimes brutal – presence felt. By turns horrifying, comic and tender, the poems crackle like a nylon sheet in the dark – full of hair-raising energy. Highly recommended.” – Esther Morgan