The Girl Who Forgets How to Walk

"The Girl Who Forgets How to Walk captures the precariousness and fragility of life" LUKE KENNARD We never speak of it, but here we know the land can’t be trusted Kate Davis writes magical realist poems born of the hills, marshes and coastal edgelands of south Cumbria. In this remarkable first collection, tarns, limekilns and abandoned pits become portals into a dark, interior world. A woman levitates above a building site; earth slips and fault-lines open up beneath the town; the sea hides ‘a gob of virus’. The moving title sequence tells the story of a young girl with polio who struggles to find her feet — and her voice — in an unforgiving landscape where ‘the ground cannot be trusted’. Alive to geology, memory and myth, The Girl Who Forgets How to Walk is a brave, uncompromising and unmissable debut.