Wales Book of the Year Focus – I Think We’re Alone Now

Published Fri 28 Jun 2024 - By Literature Wales

This blog is part of a series spotlighting the books shortlisted for the Wales Book of the Year Award 2024.

This time, we shine a light on I Think We’re Alone Now by Abigail Parry, shortlisted for the Poetry Award.

***I Think We’re Alone Now*, Abigail Parry** (Bloodaxe Books)

I Think We’re Alone Now was supposed to be a book about intimacy: what it might look like in solitude, in partnership, and in terms of collective responsibility. Instead, the poems are preoccupied with pop music, etymology, surveillance equipment and cervical examination, church architecture and beetles. Just about anything, in fact, except what intimacy is or looks like. So this is a book that runs on failure, and also a book about failures: of language to do what we want, of connection to be meaningful or mutual, and of the analytic approach to say anything useful about what we are to one another. Here are abrupt estrangements and errors of translation, frustrations and ellipses, failed investigations. And beetles.

About the Author

Abigail Parry spent several years as a toymaker before completing a PhD on wordplay. She is currently a lecturer in creative writing at Cardiff University. Her poems have been set to music, translated into Spanish, Serbian and Japanese, and widely published in journals and anthologies. She has won several prizes and awards for her work, including the Ballymaloe Prize and an Eric Gregory Award. Her first collection, Jinx (Bloodaxe Books), was named a Book of the Year in The New Statesman, The Telegraph and Morning Star. I Think We’re Alone Now is also shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize 2023.