No Good

In this debut poetry collection, Sophie van Waardenberg considers girlhood and grief, love and its loss, distance and the return home, including at its heart a sequence of emotionally raw 'Cremation Sonnets'. In its essence, this collection is the poet exploring 'goodness': 'I am unbegrudging. I am the openest pair of arms,' she tells us. 'I am a large dirty lake, a tepid naughty heart.'

'No Good is a psychologically astute, honed, vividly rendered collection from a strong, engaging new writer. It is technically taut; it confronts rough emotional territory in its overt articulation of longing, dejection, sorrow, melancholy and loss. Yet despite all this, it often sparkles with warmth, an irrepressible sense of the whimsical and quirky, and with images as clear, unpretentious and startlingly fresh as lawn daisies' -Emma Neale