Beast by Irene Solà

Beast is the first collection in English from award-winning Catalan poet Irene Solà, a darkly imaged, startling and lyrically precise exploration of gender, identity, sexuality and multiple forms of desire.

 

“Beast enters incisively, like claws. It arrives with gleaming fur and stinking. It’s a creature that spills its guts and impels the same from others—peoples, animals, limbs, foodstuffs, logical thinking, familial and sexual relations. In Irene Solà’s scenes, there’s nothing that isn’t jammed together and insecure but what’s constant is temperament. Beast comes swiftly, with a brazen laugh and cocked ears. Watch out when the lines pause for weird and possibly lethal detours. As Solà jolts, pulses and pushes off, she might leave the paths littered with bouquets or corpses.” —Heather Phillipson

 

“Sensuous, precise, and profoundly generous in their glimpses of strikingly private narratives, Sola’s poems feel perfectly placed for the strange heat of our times…” —Ben Rivers

 

“After drinking orange blossom water until she vomited everything that she had inside her, the writer and artist Leonora Carrington wrote that her stomach was ‘the mirror of the earth’. Solà’s Beast has a duckling in the belly; the words it makes her sick up are evil, brittle, full of feeling. I’m excited to see this translation from the Catalan unleashed on UK poetry.” —Sophie Collins