What It's Like to Be Alive: Selected Poems

What It’s Like to Be Alive: Selected Poems marks a career milestone for the highly-acclaimed Liverpool-based poet, Deryn Rees-Jones. Readers will find generous selections from her previously published prize-winning individual collections, as well as new work. These poems are intimately lyrical and possessed of a ‘devastating emotional power’ —John Burnside.

Deryn Rees-Jones was born in Liverpool, and educated in North Wales and London. Her debut, The Memory Tray, was nominated for the Forward Prize, and her most recent collection, Burying the Wren, was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation and nominated for both the Roland Mathias and the T.S. Eliot prize. She has edited the influential ‘Modern Women Poets’ anthology and a companion critical book, Consorting with Angels. In 2004 she was chosen as one of the Next Generation Poets, has received a Cholmondeley Award from the Society of Authors and was picked as one of the top ten women poets of the decade in Mslexia magazine. She is Professor of Poetry at the University of Liverpool where she co-directs the Centre for New and International Writing, and edits the Pavilion Poetry Series for Liverpool University Press.