The Art of Falling

Kim Moore, in her lively debut poetry collection, sets out her stall in the opening poems, firmly in the North amongst ‘My People’: “who swear without knowing they are swearing… scaffolders and plasterers and shoemakers and carers…”. The poet’s voice is direct, rhythmic, compelling. The lives of others also feature throughout, including a quietly devastating central sequence, ‘How I abandoned My Body To His Keeping’: the story of a woman embroiled in a relationship marked by coercion and violence. These are close-to-the-bone pieces, harrowing and exact.

Kim Moore has an MA from Manchester Metropolitain University. Her poems have been published in the TLS, Poetry Review, Poetry London, and elsewhere. Her pamphlet If we could speak like wolves was chosen as an Independent Book of the Year in 2012 and was shortlisted for other prizes. Moore won an Eric Gregory Award in 2011 and the Geoffrey Dearmer Prize in 2010. In 2014 she won a Northern Promise award.