The Visitations

The Visitations is the follow-up to Kathryn Simmonds' Forward Prize-winning debut, Sunday at the Skin Launderette. The poems are entertaining, amusing and accessible, but unafraid to bring in darker themes and worlds unseen. The tone shifts throughout between the elegiac and the sharply satirical, lit up with life's moments of sudden illumination: a life coach finds an old passport, an infant teeters on the brink of speech.

This playful and knowing first collection is fuelled throughout by a strong sense of lyricism. The Guardian on Sunday at the Skin Launderette

Kathryn Simmonds' first book of poems, Sunday at the Skin Launderette (Seren, 2008; ISBN 9781854114617), won the Forward Prize for Best First Collection and the Felix Dennis Prize, and was shortlisted for the Costa Poetry Award and longlisted for the Guardian First Book Award. Her pamphlet of poems Snug was a winner in the Poetry Business competition in 2004 and subsequently published by Smith/Doorstop (ISBN 9781902382678). She lives in London and works as a freelance writer, editor and teacher.