Split

Juana Adcock’s Split begins with a conversation between a woman and a snake and ends with thirteen voices affirming the vitality, difficulty and necessity of attuned communication. These poems question where we might find fulfilment, power and hope, and it turns out that’s rarely where we’ve been taught they exist. Split is at once playful, philosophical, angry, nuanced and ultimately transformative.Split is the Poetry Book Society Choice for Winter, 2019, and was Highly Commended in the 2020 Forward  Poetry Prizes.Juana Adcock's Split is one of the most exciting debuts I've ever read. Formally and linguistically innovative, Adcock's poetic dialogues expand the terms of lyric address to interrogate language itself. Here we find both violence and desire at the level of the word, upending the rootedness of power with tremendous skill and captivating authority. – Sandeep ParmarJuana Adcock’s dazzling collection is a lyrical exploration of the intersection between Mexican myths, cultural displacements and language in the context of personal and political interrogations. Split fiercely questions notions of translingualism, the female body and what it means to transcend history and ancestry. Her poetry moves between Mexico, Scotland and beyond, and speaks with an urgency and nuance that is unique in the Latinx poetry world. – Leo Boix“When asked why she decided to stay here the birlin traveller responded:/ it’s the way people speak” “Words are such good travellers/ they pick up meanings as they go.” Two quotations from the many spinning in my head after the first dip into the gorgeous richness and muliplicity of the exhilarating territory that is Juana Adcock’s work. Doppelgangers and doubles are nothing to the possessor of the 'Seven Poet Selves'. Here is sharp specificity, humour, daring. These poems rock. They sing." – Liz Lochhead