Naked Since Faversham
by Alex Josephy
£10 (pub. 2020)

Alex Josephy lives half the year in Italy, and it shows: in her descriptions of the natural world, in the musical Italian vocabulary dotted throughout these poems, and in portraits of village life from a distinctly hot and sensual climate: "His cielo is yeast / that swells the heart // of a brioche, opens / rooms of warm air / in a bread roll." (A Word in Your Ear). But the British half of her life is also richly mined, with a history of the Thames, the story of a rag-and-bone mare dug up during building works, memories of Welsh grandparents, and some delightful miscellanea – a hospital theatre that doubles up as an aircraft, a jar of ashes abandoned in a pub, and the woman who throws her clothes out the window of the First Class section of Carriage 3 during rush hour...

Praise for Naked Since Faversham:

“Alex Josephy’s new book of poems is an example of poetry’s gift – unpretentious, alert, buoyant, appreciative of small things, attentive to this and that: a life lived with care.”

Maitreyabandhu

“This is a cracking collection. What a pleasure it has been to read it; there are lots of poems that I keep going back to. Alex Josephy has managed to be tender and witty and revelatory. She made me smile and then sad... then gave a gut punch. Some poems resonated really strongly. Basically too many to mention. Gorgeous.”

Jane Kirwan

Worm Casts

Allow me worldly goods, even
in this narrow room
whose bookcase holds

my travelling companions,
whose chair’s my chariot.
Allow me muddle, confusingly

sweet, like birdsong:
nests of socks softened
beyond all darning, heels

frayed to airy nets;
perched on the coat stand
a feathered hat; stones

with silver worm casts
carried from shores I still
feel fresh remembering.

Permit me things: a tin
of pennies to buy back
the corners of my life; a box

of single earrings, wild
as lost sisters;
a bag full of buttons,

those that held it all together,
those that mercifully
came undone.

(from Naked Since Faversham)