Other Troubled Creatures by Jo Duffy

Other Troubled Creatures by Jo Duffy

Jo Duffy was one of our two runners-up in the Bare Fiction Debut Poetry Collection Competition 2015, as judged by award winning poet Andrew McMillan. I’m delighted to be publishing Jo’s first pamphlet. You can order Other Troubled Creatures right here on our online store.

“Remarkable and exciting poems which use the fantastical, and a keen eye for imagery, to examine the hardships and disappointments of everyday life”

Andrew McMillan

About Jo Duffy

Jo was born in 1991 in Swindon, and grew up in Marlborough in the Wiltshire countryside. She studied for her BA in English Literature with Creative Writing at the University of Birmingham, graduating with a first in 2013. Now based in Hackney, East London, she works as both a freelance copywriter and language researcher, and focuses on her own writing whenever she has a spare moment. She was longlisted for the Melita Hume Prize in 2015.

OF THE ANTHILL

We grew up in the kind of neighbourhood
with currents that can drag you under if you
don’t leave before you’re twenty — no one
really sinks, but it’s not a suburb of strong swimmers.

She stays, I get away. I am a monkey shot into
space without the correct breathing apparatus
and she shrinks to an ant trapped under a bottle cap
— in the early infancy of a panic attack, your body
prepares a fight or flight response. You will not
know which it is until your breath is flying up
your throat too fast for your chest or your feet
are suddenly closing down distant horizons.

As children we picked out pieces of this jigsaw town and
jammed them back in the wrong places, laughing because
we were still the puzzle-masters. I left dog shit on the door
step of her mother’s ex-boyfriend’s porch, and she released
colonies of ants into car exhaust pipes so they could travel.

When I call from Taiwan I am watching
one crawl up my leg, and we both hear
the ocean roaring in the static
between us.

Jo Duffy, from her new pamphlet ‘Other Troubled Creatures’.

Book Details