Our featured publication for Winter is Deathless by Catherine Balaq, published by Verve Poetry Press.

Sex and death are truisms. We begin through the act of one and the other is the ultimate exit. This collection moves between the two, expanding on tropes of sexuality and creation acts with a core of sonnets that speak back to their origins. Both traditional and modern, the poems in Deathless turn the male gaze into the female subject and place life’s darkness in chiaroscuro contrast with beauty and light.

‘Catherine Balaq channels the daemon onto the page summoning colour from darkness.‘ Paul Lynch

‘Balaq’s words leave you breathless, burning through the page, reaching into the depths of you and making no apology for it. In ‘Deathless’ we are confronted with the complex, beautiful and exhilarating nature of being alive.’ Ophira Adar

‘Intimate, open-hearted and blazingly honest, the poems in Deathless establish Balaq as a distinctive and engaging voice. Memory and survival; wit and invention; attention to the indignities and the forcefulness of resilience; duty and wild abandon. It captures the beautiful and terrifying simultaneity of life: all of this is happening at once, is behind us, is coming our way.‘  Luke Kennard

‘Deathless turns a direct, unflinching gaze upon Freud’s twin drives – sex and death – and tracks the nuances of female desire, its ambivalences and contradictions, celebrating its incendiary agency with precision and control.‘ Meryl Pugh

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Object Relations

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Turning 30 in New York

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Whistle

Previously published in Poetry Wales, Spring 2023

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How to Winter

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Catherine Balaq is a writer and body psychotherapist. Her work has been shortlisted for the Bridport Prize and nominated for the Pushcart and Forward Prizes. She is co-editor of Black Cat Press. Her debut collection ‘animaginary’ was published in 2023. ‘Deathless’ is her second collection. Catherine also writes novels and is represented by Donald
Winchester at Watson Little.

Copies of Deathless are available to purchase from the Verve Poetry Press website, here.