Kate Feld at House of Books & Friends

Kate Feld has a book out and we couldn’t be happier – Deeryard is a new pamphlet of prose poetry and photographs, published by Manchester independent press Death of Workers Whilst Building Skyscrapers.

Here’s a bit about the book: “In Deeryard, a series of tenderly observed internal states, natural settings and photographed landscapes serve to collapse the distance between the speaker and the world she inhabits. The poems are acts of orientation, making their way through phenomenological inquiry toward a new sense of being at home in our lostness.”

At this launch event at indie bookseller House of Books & Friends, writer Kate Feld will be reading poems from the new book, as well as signing copies. Joining Kate Feld to launch Deeryard and read some of their own work are poet friends Mick Conley and Lydia Unsworth, whose Arthropod is out soon with Death of Workers and follows the collections Some Murmur (Beia Bua/Downingfield Press), Mortar (Osmosis Press, 2021), Certain Manoeuvres (KFS Press, 2018) and Nostalgia for Bodies (2018 Erbacce Poetry Prize).

Mick Conley – winner of the Peggy Poole Award 2022 and whose collection These Are Not My Dreams And Anyway Nothing Here Is Purple was published by Nine Pens in 2021 – says of Deeryard: “These prose poems are full of music: the sounds of a richly evoked natural world where ‘something always has to be happening’, and the sounds of language itself being wrung out for its harmonies. They are both experimental and beautiful, highly crafted and instinctive. In Kate Feld’s work, a relationship with nature seems to be a relationship with the past and a reckoning with the self. If the places in these pieces are real, then they are made imaginative by the inherent unreliability of memory and language; if they are imagined, then they are made real by the quality of observation and sensory detail.”

Jenna Collins (One, 2, 3, Joan Publishing) says: “It is remarkable to be brought back into your life when the living of it requires a sort of packaging up and glossing over. Deeryard reclaims the friction. Image and text lead you through situations, often of sound, in which the slow accumulation of self-knowledge and the compulsions of non-human life become entangled and momentarily perceivable before slipping out of hand to resume their secret ongoing operations.”

Deeryard is Kate Feld’s first pamphlet. Drawn to the cracks between established categories of form and genre, her writing has appeared in literary journals including The Stinging Fly, The Letters Page, Tolka and Hotel, and in The Art of Being Dangerous: Exploring Women and Danger Through Creative Expression (Leuven University Press). She founded creative nonfiction journal The Real Story in 2014 and teaches journalism at the University of Salford. A native of Vermont, she has lived for many years in Manchester, UK, with her daughters.