Scale

Mina Gorji's second collection is full of creatures and their habitats, building on the considerable achievement of her debut, The Art of Escape.

Format: Paperback / softback
Length: 56 pages
Publication date: 28 July 2022
Publisher: Carcanet Press Ltd

At the volcano's edge, in exilic space, at the bottom of the Arctic Sea, or in the acid clouds of Venus, Mina Gorji's Scale traces life at its limits. The poems span scales of distance, temperature, and time, from vast to minute, glacial to volcanic, Pleistocene to present day, constellation to millipede. Adapting to the cold of a new continent opens a chromatic investigation of feeling. Shifting between scales, from insect to ancient star, Scale explores the forms, conditions, and frequencies of survival.

Scale builds on the considerable achievement of Gorji's first book, Art of Escape (2019). When it was selected for the Telegraph Poetry Book of the Month, Tristram Fane Saunders wrote about the incisive clarity of Gorji's work, calling one poem "perfection in miniature." Gorji's poems feed into current ecological concerns, but in no conventional or clichéd way. Marina Warner described her poems as "building a place of safety" for herself, her family, her readers, and all those who are wandering and uprooted; her poetic methods take their cue from the many marvelous creatures she evokes and the multiple protective measures they adopt—nests, camouflage, mimicry, display. Above all, language can help create shelter.

Weight: 86g
Dimension: 134 x 216 x 7 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9781800172142