Apricot is a devastating debut from one of the UK's brightest and most fascinating poets, written with the urgency of someone who knows they might not make it through the weekend. Katie O'Pray's is a highly articulate poetics, kicking against the language of convention that would seek to limit us. The improvisational vocabulary at play here engenders both a developed identity and a young identity continuously being made, as each section of the book subverts the questions of mental health practitioners with wisdom and panache. These poems do not just concern the violence of gender, of sexuality, of disability, of addiction, they reinvigorate how these violences can be understood. This is a collection of singular quality.
Katie O'Pray (they/them) is a Bedforshire-based poet who is studying Linguistics & Creative Writing at the University of Hertfordshire. Winner of the Oxford Brookes International Poetry Competition 2021 and recipient of The ruth weiss Foundation's Emerging Poet Grant 2021, they use their poetry as a vessel to explore their overlapping and corroborating identities, as a queer person, a disabled person, a trauma survivor and addict. Their work has received recognition from the Magma Poetry Competition and the Out-Spoken Prize for Poetry, as well as being shared in support of The National Survivor User Network and ELFT's 'Break the Stigma' campaign.
