The Pharmacy

The Pharmacy is an extended exploration of family, loss, and the indignities of British medical institutions. Building a landscape that is at once influenced by autotheory, life experience of care, and a fervent critique of austerity, this is a fiery second collection from Kat Sinclair. The poems of Kat Sinclair's The Pharmacy 'cannot write through / as (they) are supposed to', but struggle to stand, love, grieve, wriggle, spit jokes from within brutal desiccated infrastructures, learning machines, the last things left to be stolen away from us. Where 'the hospital is a factory', out of the deadness of memeified language and bloodied pop-cultural dreck, these side-eye-lyrics don't just transcribe addictive assaults on attention but hold to our aftermaths, without healalls. They bring on an interruptive headrush to run ungoogleably with the sabs, at communism, at 'new ways of speaking', however brokenly, however thickly, however in pain, at what you've been told, lied to for all your life is impossible. - Dom Hale In these dense, lucid poems, the personal and political intertwine and elegy is reformed, revitalised: now lyrical, now stubborn, now taking you by surprise with their humour. The Pharmacy shocks and soothes, jars and lulls: this is a collection deeply of and defiantly against its time. - Helen Charman