Description
These untamed and tender poems lead the reader through dark ominous forests and amidst poisonous flora in a journey that weaves together storytelling and folklore into its poetic landscapes. This collection forms an intricate lace bejewelled with feminine rage, delicate nostalgia, and yearning. The hedge witch asks what it is to be from a community, but not necessarily of it.
We are enthralled by the undoing of the violences of modern society and balmed by a deep connection to the natural world, leaving us with pockets stuffed with fungi – sometimes deadly, sometimes delicious. Always wild.
“In Mycelium, Leah Atherton has crafted a disquieting world of liminal spaces which hold the ghosts of trauma. Yet underpinning these poems is a thread of hope – self-acceptance as radical healing, the justice of ancient magic, a deep rooting in the backdrop of a forest that both gives and takes away.” – Cherry Doyle
“Leah’s instinctual and textured poetry instantly transfers you into a forest of deception, self discovery and love. The reader is welcomed into a world populated by memory and individuals who merge the sweetness and violence of living. Spooky and magical tales unlock a long forgotten world that stretches forward in time into moments from today. Leah creates vivid, bright snapshots into the darkest corners of ordinary life. Reality entwines an old, magical world as the pamphlet explores the conflict and nurture between nature, womanhood, and love.” – Heddwen Bethan
“If you come into the trees, you’ll find ‘something beautiful and deadly’, vengeance, violence, an uprooting of the patriarchy. Leah’s poignant second collection reaches to the back of the cupboard and offers us a haunting of hearts, memories, forests and phone boxes. You may hunger for each line, each morsel, but you must be wary when foraging of what might kill you or melt you to softness. Mycelium intertwines realism and fantasy: you’ll meet with the witch and sit with the proverbial poet who makes you linger, wonder, take heed. Take notice, these teachings may just save you.” – Charlotte Lunn
“One approaches these poems like a curious forager probing the leaf-litter. Mycelium emerges, true to its name, like a mushroom, hemmed by ‘Fields Notes’ which frame the poems like gills. To read on is to push your fingernails through the loamy flesh, to reveal a world poised on the cusp: between thunderstorms and drought, fury and sorrow, the said and unsaid. Leah’s poems are composed with the deftness of the hedge witch weaving her yarn, and her words catch like spores, imprinted on your mind long after the cover has closed.” – Nellie Cole
This purchase is a preorder and will be posted as soon as the title is published estimated September 2024