Description
Sarah Barnsley grew up in the Midlands where her dad was a firefighter. A winner in the Poetry Society Members’ Poems Competition (2021, 2018), her work has appeared widely in magazines including Poetry Wales, The Rialto and The White Review. Other publications include a pamphlet, The Fire Station (Telltale Press, 2015), co-editorship of Truths: A Telltale Press Anthology (2018), and literary criticism. Sarah is Senior Lecturer in English and American Literature at Goldsmiths, University of London and lives in Hove.
‘[A] camp and playful debut collection […] in a culture where mental health is fraught with ableist stigma, Barnsley energetically reminds us that we have transformative art forms, with which we can break – game face on’ – Wendy Kyle, London Grip
‘What is so striking about this book is Barnsley’s inventive and completely joyous use of form. Just flicking through it, before reading anything, it doesn’t really seem like a poetry book at all’ – Emma Simon, The Friday Poem
‘This is an extraordinarily good collection […] refreshing, boundary pushing, illustrative […] It’s not often one encounters a poetry collection you want to read in one sitting. Here it is!’ – Janet Sutherland, Frogmore Papers
‘To read this book is an immersive experience, not always comfortable but giving the reader a sense of being inside the mind of an OCD sufferer […] which Sarah Barnsley describes in often comically surreal ways’ – Theresa Sowerby, Orbis
‘[T]akes the reader into the maelstrom of OCD […] absurdities are played with a straight face, reaching heights of the weirdly surreal, yet also giving a genuine sense of the individual’s suffering’ – Martyn Crucefix, Magma
Sarah Barnsley’s debut collection The Thoughts is a wondrous and vital book that pushes the boundaries of what a poetry book can do and the subject it takes on – in this case, the mind (said to be medical science’s final frontier) […] The approach taken by Barnsley perfectly fits the subject at hand. The poems come in many forms, from your expected black-on-white lineation to the downright surreal – as a questionnaire, a puzzle, funding proposal, and PhD Viva that draws on Barnsley’s experience as an academic. This makes the subject of intrusive and uncontrollable thoughts all the more direct by putting them in everyday examples […]. This is a superb collection, smattered with humour, that shows a condition many experience but is rarely talked about – one of the many invisible disabilities, and one which Barnsley bravely makes visible. – Peter Raynard, Everybody’s Reviewing
Sarah Barnsley […] throws both accepted truth and caution to the winds – Thomas Ovans, London Grip, on ‘I prefer to get my information from unreliable sources’
I love its colloquial diction, its creative topography that knits together its fragments and its scientists in love, its headlong energy – Meryl Pugh on ‘Newly in love, distracted neuroscientists HEART’
