The City She Was

"When you open this book, expect serious role-playing and syntactic tap dancing. "The City She Was" presents a world that brings the horizon line into your lexicon and a poet' muse ("The Endangered You" is lent to a friend and returned a little more frayed)." Gimenez Smith muddles and enchants with her many masks, leaving the ground a little less stable under our feet." (Matthea Harvey). "The human body has only five senses but "The City She Was" re-routes the architecture of experience so effectively that the reader is awarded a new unnamed sense, a soft power, one that reprioritises our outdated reality with the gathering infrastructure of the geography of language. The whole aggressive world is this book's only enemy, and no one tricks absurdity into form, reality into abstraction, injustice into stylised verdict, and contemporary popular culture into a useful, heroic trap of surreal-her-wholeness like Carmen Gimenez Smith." (Thomas Sayers Ellis).