March Reading Diary

By Kim Moore

Evening all - and apologies that the March reading diary is slightly delayed. I’ve had a bit of a mad March and into April - partly due to a full-on teaching timetable, and then over the Easter holidays I went to Ireland with family for ten days. As well as all of that, a lot of my reading time this month has been taken up reading and judging this year’s Poetry Business Pamphlet Competition. Results will be announced very shortly - so keep an eye on the Poetry Business website here

Here are some of the books that have kept me company during my travels this month! Three poetry collections, a novel and a book of short stories.

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That Broke Into Shining Crystals (Faber, 2025)
Richard Scott

I am late to the party with this one. I have Richard’s first collection Soho (Faber, 2018) which I really enjoyed, and this one has been on my radar for a while but just haven’t had a chance to buy it.

However, one of our stops in Ireland was Galway, so I took Ally for a rainy walk to Charlie Byrne’s Bookshop. It has the most amazing poetry section, and I picked up this and a book by Richard Siken as well at the same time (more on that later!)

This collection has entered into my top ten contemporary poetry collections (alongside such brilliance as Stags Leap by Sharon Olds). The subject matter is male-on-male sexual assault, rape and the trauma associated with it. Perhaps this explains why it hasn’t been on as many prize lists as it should have - not because of the subject matter, but because of the original and unique approach to language and formal craft that Richard deploys throughout the book.

The book is made up of three sections, and my favourite was probably the first, called “Still Lifes”. Each poem is a Still Life with something i.e Still Life with Rose, Still Life with Lobster, Fruit and Timepiece. In the notes at the back of the book are the painting, or paintings that the poem is in conversation with. It took me a long time to read through these poems because I was reading the poem, then looking up the painting and then going back to re-read the poem again. I’ve never really appreciated the particular genre of 17th and 18th century still life paintings that the poet is engaged with before, but now I’ve read these poems, I feel like I will never look at them in the same way again - which is an amazing thing for a poem to do - to change the way we look at the world, the way we encounter art. Of course I believe the best poetry can do this, but it’s always a shock when it happens.

The second section takes the lexicon of Andrew Marvell’s “To His Coy Mistress” and rearranges it and dis-assembles it, whilst the third section takes a series of crystals and gemstones as its starting point. All three sections are I think trying to find the answer to how to use language to examine trauma, but also to examine how we find language for experiences like grooming in particular.

I think the book is also about how we are changed by art, but also how art is changed by the lives/bodies we inhabit.

Buy this book if: you are interested in ekphrasis, in writing about trauma, violence, control and vulnerability, if you’re interested in poetic sequences, if you’re interested in how silences and the breakdown of language can communicate

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I Who Have Never Known Men (Vintage, 2019)
Jacqueline Harpman

I rarely buy physical copies of novels because what happens is I start reading them, and then I can’t stop. I stay up all through the night because I have to get to the end. So I prefer to listen to them now on Audible whilst I’m commuting. However, I went to the most amazing bookshop in Shipley, Salts Mill Shop, a few weeks ago, and this book was on one of the stands where the bookseller recommends it, and the title caught my eye.

I read the first page and knew I had to buy it. And predictably I stayed up all night to read it and finished at about 2am, exhilarated, changed, frustrated, moved – all of those things that the best books can do to us. The book opens in an underground bunker where forty women are trapped. There are male guards but they never speak or interact other than to give food and material to make clothes every now and then. I raced through the book wanting to find out why the women were there – and it took me getting to the end to realise that was a pointless question.

The great question the novel circles around and around is what makes us human when everything is stripped away, when not only are we imprisoned, humiliated, powerless – which is territory that is often explored in dystopian fiction – but what happens when knowledge is stripped away – when there is a blankness in the space where some sense, some story might be created?

The main character’s thirst for knowledge for the sake of knowing I found incredibly moving, and it felt to me as if one of the answers to what makes us human is the drive to know – to know so that we can help ourselves and make our lives better, but also the drive to know just for the sake of knowing, because we are hungry for knowledge, all the time. Perhaps another answer to what makes us human is companionship, love, community, structures – even in places where the women are powerless, they organise themselves, they help each other, they try to understand each other.

It’s one of my favourite novels I’ve read this year I think – and again, I think I’m late to the party with this one as apparently it is a bit of a cult classic. It is one of those books that sold in low numbers when it was first published and then steadily, gradually its numbers have increased as readers recommended it and passed it on.

Buy this book if: you want to be haunted weeks after finishing it, if you’re interested in books where there are no easy answers, if you like dystopian fiction, if you’re interested in thinking about what makes us human.

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Cursed Bunny
Bora Chung
Translated by Anton Hur

I saw this book in the Salt Mills Shop as well. The cover attracted me, and I’m always on the look out for short stories at the moment, as I’m trying to write my own! Then I opened the first page, and this is what made me buy the book. This is from the first story, called “The Head”.

"She was about to flush the toilet. 
    "Mother?"
    She looked back. There was a head popping out of the toilet, calling for her. 
    "Mother?"
    The woman looked at it for a moment. Then, she flushed the toilet. The head disappeared in a rush of water. 
    She left the bathroom." 

I mean, how could you not want to read on? The collection is a mix of magical realism, horror and science fiction, often dealing with the violence of the systems such as patriarchy and capitalism that we live under and through. I loved these stories - they were darkly funny, always unsettling, and sometimes moving. The first story, “The Head” was one of my favourites, but I also loved “Scars” which felt like a mini mythic novel, and “Home Sweet Home”, a brilliant ghost story.

Buy this book if: you like your short stories crossing genre between magic realism, fairy tale, myth, horror and fantasy with bucket loads of dark humour and big things to say about the patriarchy and power

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I Do Know Some Things
Richard Siken

I’m late to the party as well with this one in terms of realising how brilliant Richard Siken is. I saw one of his poems shared on social media a few months ago “Sentence” (which I can only currently find on Reddit, so I won’t link to it!) and thought it was brilliant. I took it in to work to share with my second year students. Then when I was at the aforementioned Salt Mills Shop, a poetry book caught my eye - it was called Crush and it had a sticker saying “20 year anniversary edition”. My curiosity was instantly piqued as I couldn’t believe firstly that a poetry collection had been reissued and celebrated and secondly, why hadn’t I heard of it?

It was only when I started reading the poems that I connected the poem I’d read all those months ago on social media to the poet Richard Siken, whose debut collection Crush is a kind of modern classic. It won the 2004 Yale Series of Younger Poets competition, judged by no less than the genius Louise Gluck and since then has lived many lives via social media/tik tok etc.

The twenty year anniversary edition has a really interesting foreword from Louise Gluck and an even more interesting afterword from Richard Siken, and the poems are full of fire and energy - I really liked this book and read it cover to cover in one go, although I would also say I think I would have loved it even more if I’d read it in my twenties (rather than my forties!). I would recommend it as an example of a brilliant, daring debut collection - you can buy it here.

I Do Know Some Things is Siken’s third collection, published in 2025 by Chatto in this country. In between was his second collection War of the Foxes, but I haven’t got my hands on that one yet. I Do Know Some Things is a whole collection made up of prose poems. It feels wrong and overly simplistic to say this collection tells the story of the poet suffering a stroke and its aftermath as he tries to put together fragments and pieces of language - it is about that of course, but it’s about so much more. It is about language and how we tell the story of ourselves, about family and friendship and what remains after catastrophe. It’s dark, and funny and tender, and angry and violent, often in the same poem.

Buy this book if: you are interested in the prose poem as a form, how you can use narrative in poetry, a book as an artistic project in and of itself, how to write about illness and recovery, how to create layers in poetry

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Dog Star
Michael Symmons Roberts

I should declare an interest here as Michael was my PhD supervisor, and we are now colleagues at Manchester Writing School. I went along to Michael’s book launch at Manchester Poetry Library and really enjoyed the event, and hearing him talk about his ninth (!) full-length poetry collection Dog Star. Fans of Michael’s work will enjoy this collection, but I think it also pushes further into the territory he has always explored throughout his writing life - the body and the soul and the division between the two, the inner/outer world and place.

The collection is brimming with encounters with things - whether this is grey squirrels or a blackbird, a fox or ramson flies - I love the way that he tries to pin down what something is really like in language. Where a lesser poet would settle for a good image, Michael chases down the image and recasts it over and over - in ‘Greys’ the squirrels shift from ‘tree-rats’ to ‘ash-tree acrobats’ to ‘spirits of smoke’ to ‘three spindles’ to jittery / hair-triggered shadow-tails’.

This is a collection in conversation with other writers as well. One of my favourite poems is “Eurasian Blackbird” which is both complete in itself whilst also being in conversation with “13 Ways of Looking At a Blackbird” by Wallace Stevens. In Michael’s poem, both the speaker and the reader are caught in the eye of the blackbird, 'which holds the ‘old woods, / dense and slow with song: / all beasts, shadows, shafts of sun / distilled into a ripe full-stop’. There are other writers that are an influence as well though - D.H Lawrence sings through many of these poems, and there are epigraphs from Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman as well.

It is a rich and layered collection - if you can get to hear Michael read from it, I would recommend it as I found it fascinating hearing more about the work and ideas that sit in and around the poems - drawn not just from other poets, but from musicians, scientists and philosophers.

Buy this book if: you enjoy poetry that engages with place, landscape and the natural world whilst also being interested in the connection between humans and non-human, if you like beautifully written elegies, meditative poetry on the body and soul, life and death, if you want a masterclass in image-making.

All of these books can be bought from my Bookshop.org shop here, or at any good bookshop local to you