The Way the Crocodile Taught Me

By Katrina Naomi

“I love The Way the Crocodile Taught Me for Katrina Naomi’s cool voice and fierce eye. For her humour and compassion. For her cast of colourful characters: from a cross-dressing step-father to the Kray twins and a dubious lama. For the journey she takes us – from a childhood a lesser poet would have milked for its sob-stuff to a pass high in the Annapurna mountains where, taking the lama’s blessing for her dead mother, she allows her emotion to pour out in a passage all the more moving because of her previous reticence.” – Vicki Feaver “These are fiercely and triumphantly female poems, recording in sensuous detail the objects, clothes, emotions of a difficult childhood, recalling her departed father, her mother’s men, the hated step-father. They are written with brave truth. It’s a vivid collection of elegy and celebration.” – Gillian Clarke The Way the Crocodile Taught Me is the eagerly awaited new poetry collection by Katrina Naomi. In it she reveals a childhood fraught with family dislocation, upsets and even occasional violence, and finds, through her art, moments of grace, humour and redemption.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Seren
• Release date: Jul 9, 2016
• ISBN: 9781781723326

Katrina Naomi

Katrina Naomi was awarded an Authors’ Foundation grant by the Society of Authors in 2018 for work on her third poetry collection, which is due from Seren in 2020. In 2018, she received a BBC commission for National Poetry Day, her poem ‘Countrywoman’ was broadcast on radio and made into a film-poem and broadcast on television. Katrina has just completed a residency at the Leach Pottery in St Ives, Cornwall. She has recently returned from a writing trip to Japan, following a grant from the Arts Council International Artist’s Development Fund. Katrina’s poetry has been broadcast on BBC Radio 4 (Front Row and Poetry Please) and appeared in The TLS, The Poetry Review and Modern Poetry in Translation. Her latest collection, The Way the Crocodile Taught Me, Seren (2016), was praised by Vicki Feaver for its ‘cool voice and fierce eye’ and chosen by Foyles Bookshop as one of its #FoylesFive for poetry. In 2017, her poem ‘The Bicycle’ was highly commended in The Forward Prize for Poetry and she was nominated for the 2017 Best of the Net Award.