How to Be A Dragonfly

£7.95

How to be a Dragonfly was a winner in the 2004 Book & Pamphlet Competition.

Coming of age in the writings of decadent Europe, prose poetry re-discovered its voice through modernist American literature. Many leading writers have championed prose poetry – Baudelaire, Stein, Kafka, Calvino, Holub, Atwood – and now, emerging from these traditions, Patricia Debney adds her own resonant voice, re-introducing this contemporary yet undervalued genre to the British literary scene.

‘The prose poem is a very special invention, like a chair that flies or a small dish that produces food for forty people.’ — David Young, Models of the Universe: An Anthology of the Prose Poem

‘…exquisite writing moving with surprising lightness and depth that I’ve had to read and re-read…’ — Dreamcatcher

‘…there is magic beneath the lines that will not be easy to forget.’ — NHI Review

‘Reading Patricia Debney’s prose poems feels like watching a bareback rider ride with more grace and control than most manage with the help of saddle and bridle.’ — Susan Wicks

‘The choices of language and images invite us to return to read again; about the end of the garden, or the planet Venus, or the Arctic Circle, or the way dragonflies move in dimensions we might, if we only let ourselves.’  Katherine Pierpoint

‘Patricia Debney’s prose poems are like stories that begin then hesitate to preserve the moment before they must end. They are tiny monuments to lightness, mirrors in motion that show our reflections in shop windows.’ — George Szirtes

Out Of Print