Released May 31st, 2024 // 48 pages // 978-1-916938-21-2 // RRP £8.99
Katy Mack's First, I Turn Off the Light is as unsettling and disarming as it is compassionate and brave. Mack's poems are an exploration of illness and mental health, and in doing so are lyrical, imaginative, full of humour and insight. These words are not weighed down by a desire to define illness and mental health, but instead celebrate the human experience that is so often at the heart of both.This is a rare and essential debut.
PRAISE for First, Turn Off the Light:
The scarecrow, the clown, a heron, a shark costume, Emily Brontë all haunt these enigmatic and powerful poems by Katy Mack in which the experience and suffering of OCD, ‘and it pounds / and it pounds’, is sensitively and generously transformed into a surreal, and lyric, landscape ‘faint but persistent, / edging [us] back to the sound’.
— Richard Scott
Katy Mack’s impressive debut offers a unique and riveting interaction with the world. There is struggle and frustration when navigating household space, and a palpable sense of isolation when stepping beyond the domestic boundary. But nothing is straightforwardly told. Her disquieting poems form a collection where the surreal is woven with visual precision, the strangeness laced with lasting poignancy. The result left me moved and thrilled. — Rebecca Goss
Katy Mack’s poems, with their hauntings, proliferations and alter egos, offer an inventive, subtle response to Obsessive Compulsive Disorder and to mental disquiet. So much is deliciously and unnervingly in flux like the wedding in ‘A mix up’ which merges unforgettably with a funeral, or the secret which “turned and scurried back / into my open mouth / burrowing itself into my chest” (‘In the play I saw about a door-to-door hoover salesman’). This gravely playful début is a triumph.
— Moniza Alvi
ABOUT Katy Mack:
Katy Mack’s poems have appeared widely in publications including The Poetry Review, Ambit, Poem International, Poetry Birmingham Literary Journal, and Perverse. She has also been commended in The Troubadour International Poetry Prize. She completed her creative writing PhD in poetry at UEA in 2022 and is currently a Research Impact Fellow at The University of Sussex.
