Cheryl's Destinies

history is what we call / what might have happened differently / and didn’ t It is the decade of centuries, and Cheryl tells us our fortune. Radicals liberate a zoo, teenagers flirt in a bowling alley, and W. B. Yeats discovers the music of The Smashing Pumpkins. It’ s almost always the anniversary of something terrible while tourists mosey through the graveyards of the world; the dead are cherished. In this thrillingly strange exploration of the comfort of the fantastical when the real is hard to bear, Stephen Sexton takes us on a journey through the past and the present, while Cheryl translates from the future, showing us how we exist in all three at once.

Stephen Sexton’ s first book, If All the World and Love Were Young was the winner of the Forward Prize for Best First Collection in 2019 and the Shine / Strong Award for Best First Collection. He was awarded the E. M. Forster Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature in 2020. He was the winner of the National Poetry Competition in 2016 and the recipient of an Eric Gregory Award in 2018. Cheryl’ s Destinies was published in 2021, and was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Collection.