Calamities!

In her second, spine-cracking collection, Jane Arthur wants ‘to get morbid’. Moving with ease between the cerebral and the ethereal she measures her anxieties against a cosmic canvas – taking in everything from meteorites and distant planets to pomanders and cat’s ears. Whether contemplating time, regret, or the end of the world, these poems don’t flinch. But in writing against hope, Arthur also writes against hopelessness, and finds, at the heart of it all, a bear, sleeping soundly – or perhaps dead.

'Calamities! is a compelling book of the unsettled and unsettling, set in a world where comfort is an endangered animal and the apocalypse lurks outside our front doors. Jane Arthur’s perceptive and all-too-relatable poems are what we need in these uncertain times – they make me an even bigger fan of her already astonishing body of work.' —Chris Tse

'It’s hard for poems to be funny without undermining their own seriousness, but Arthur’s are like that.' —Kate Camp, The Spinoff