Released January 31st, 2025 // 48 pages // 978-1-916938-69-4 // RRP: £9.99
Rushika Wick’s Infections of Loss is a searing exploration of how the past imprints itself on the body, weaving threads of harm and resilience through time and space. Through vivid, haunting poetry, the collection navigates the reverberations of adversity, documenting the unspoken hauntings of personal and collective histories. Here, eulogies meet acts of witness and moments of tentative reconciliation. Each piece ripples outward, charting how pain, shaped by systems and inherited through generations, lingers in the unseen folds of our lives. A lyrical reckoning, Wick's poetry confronts the intimate and systemic with both tenderness and unflinching honesty.
PRAISE for Infections of Loss:
In Infections of Loss Rushika Wick’s poetry performs as an artful display of poetic thought slipping and spilling out the messy junction of intergenerational trauma and belonging. Her poetry is vibrant and dynamic, unafraid to wrap itself around the bigger questions, resisting resolve and solution, instead, composing for us a window which we lean towards and experience.
— Anthony Anaxagorou
Rushika Wick’s Infections of Loss examines a desire to seek and be seen. These poems push deeply at what it is to remember, and the ways we articulate love and fear in the telling. Family, the earth, the body are at once resilient and fragile and ‘the purest currency is memory.’ A collection that quivers with emotion and poetic invention, Wick’s work questions, unsettles, moves and excites.
— Rebecca Goss
Rushika Wick’s Infections of Loss pries apart the diasporic condition: its ghosts, absences and memories of ‘aerogram - / blue petals pulled / from a hullabaloo’ or ‘forgotten script / in a small basket / of a corner shop.’ Wick’s dancerly command of imagery and her fleet ‘lightning-rod’ pen trace the delicate piercings of loss, documenting their pattern and spread through the body and the world.
— Gita Ralleigh
ABOUT Rushika Wick:
Rushika Wick’s first poetry collection Afterlife As Trash (Verve 2021) was highly commended in the Forward prizes and concerns selfhood and value in late stage capitalism. She runs sunseekers poetry project with Ana Seferovic - curating multidisciplinary and cross-modal events and an online archive and has collaborated with dancers, produced ekphrastic work for the National Gallery and creates visual poem objects and films. Her second book Horse (Broken Sleep 2024) is a hybrid work on speculative archives.
