Small

We all have our favourite demons. A desperate Romeo circles the bushes below Juliet’s balcony, hoping for a glimpse of her bare body, ‘nipples stiffening on powdered ribs’. Adamant of his own sanity, Hamlet chatters away to his oldest friend – the squat skull grinning in his palm. Andromache screams for her only child, ‘spiralling like sycamore’ from the walls of Troy, her husband brutally dragged to death in the dirt that rises around her. All the while, weaved throughout this collection, the narrator is haunted by her biggest demon of all: the gargantuan Small. Told with a rawness and honesty that sears, the secretive nature of living with an eating disorder is yanked out into the open and given the voice that only ever hisses darkly inside the skull. Through relationship breakdowns, bath-times, the cacophonous dazzle of Delhi and the fug of hospital waiting rooms, Small is always, there slyly riding on the shoulders of a woman running for miles to get away – yet forever haunted by hunger.

Natalie Ann Holborow is a writer, digital content specialist and co-editor of the Cheval anthology. She was 2015 winner of both the Terry Hetherington Award and RobinReeves Prize and has been shortlistedand commended for various others including the Bridport Prize, the National Poetry Competition and the Hippocrates Prize for Poetry and Medicine. Her debut collection, And Suddenly You Find Yourself, was launched at the Kolkata International Book Festival, and was listed as one of Wales Arts Review’s ‘Best of 2017’. She recently came runner-up in Swansea Poetry Slam. Her blog, Running on Insulin, is where she posts experiences and advice for others living with type 1 diabetes.