Day 3 Dear Adriene, Female bears sleep right through birth. You say, give your littlebelly a pet – you say, smear a little honey across the ribcage – butvisualise for me waking up, unaware of any sign of danger, withsore teats and tiny eyes you can’t escape. I’ve never wanted notto be a mother more than now, half-asleep with heat. Instead,I claim this fusty cave, a lunar flag ‘waving’. You say, notice howyou feel, and I assure you, I’ve been trying. Day 4 Dear Adriene, Teach me how to talk to invisible things. How to measureshoreline length. Focus on a steady state. How can some thingstwist in my mind like morning glories? I think I am invasive.I keep saying no but you grow into all my empty spaces. Dearones, how you multiply. Day 21 Dear Adriene, What are you waiting for? A better body, straighter teeth, a tastefor it, for...

Doireann Ní Ghríofa’s A Ghost in the Throat (Ghost) is a book that, in a swift, sensitive movement, has achieved something that many people speak about, think about and slowly edge closer towards after years of scholarship and research. Across various interviews and within the folds of the text itself, Ní Ghríofa relays how she comes to the story of Eibhlín Dubh Ní Chonaill on the periphery of other paths that are well-worn. In Ghost, charting a timeline between the 1700s and the present moment, Ní Ghríofa traces the life of the poet Ní Chonaill through a series of personal reckonings. Stretching the text over the edges of her own experiences of motherhood and tragedy, she fills the gaps in our knowledge of the poet by listening out for echoes of her life today. Ní Ghríofa is not researching from within academia, and the book sings because of it. While...

Off the northwest coast of Ireland, between the white sands of Trá Bhán and the Atlantic’s roiling waves, there is a rocky islet, approximately 150 metres long and 100 metres wide, marked on Google Maps as Illanamarve. The islet transforms depending on point of observation: from certain parts of the surrounding landscape, it presents as one of the many promontories edging the shore, from other angles, it’s clearly a place distinct. Though visible from most nearby towns, such as Annagry and Carrickfinn, at closer range Illanamarve is intermittently blocked from view by rising topography. Just as you catch sight of it, you lose it again. Composed almost entirely of granite, the island has a shallow covering of soil and grass but is devoid of trees or shrubbery. The route from Trá Bhán to the island – passable only at low tide – changes quickly underfoot from sand to loose rocks...

‘The fawn looked at me, batting four sets of lashes, giving disarming smile. Off he went, hustling around the bandstand, rattling the local blue tits to the core.’ Isabel Waidner’s latest novel, Corey Fah Does Social Mobility (2023), spans prize culture, notions of social mobility, wormholes, daytime telly and, perhaps most memorably, an eight-legged Bambi. Waidner’s previously published work includes Gaudy Bauble (2017), Liberating the Canon (2018), We Are Made of Diamond Stuff (2019) and Sterling Karat Gold (2021), which won the 2021 Goldsmiths Prize. Corey Fah, like Waidner, is a writer who has won a literary prize – in Corey’s case, ‘The Award for the Fictionalization of Social Evils’. But Corey Fah struggles to collect the prize, which takes the form of a UFO that hovers just out of reach.  After failing to collect the prize, Corey Fah returns home to their partner, Drew Szumski, who is obsessed with...