What are You After?

By Josephine Corcoran

“There is no tick box for this poem. This poem grew up on benefits. This poem pays higher rate tax. This poem isn’t in an anthology. This poem doesn’t have a glottal stop.”

Josephine Corcoran’s inventive and unflinching debut poetry collection asks us to consider what it is we’re really here for. Bold and unsentimental, her remarkable poems trace the lifelines of where we’ve been and where we’re going to, and they aren’t afraid to ask difficult questions of where we are now, either.

Corcoran’s dexterity allows her to get under the skin of each poem, and to explore other lives with the same attentiveness and concision she brings to her own experiences. What Are You After is also fearlessly personal and political; these resolute poems celebrate outspoken women, working class and immigrant lives, and they refuse to look away from the harsh realities of inequality, austerity, and poverty. Throughout, the haunting texture of history, of long gone places and lost voices, is discernible just beneath the surface of the everyday present like a mirror’s delicate silvering. These poems are a rare gift; tender, incisive and real.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Nine Arches Press
• Release date: Jun 22, 2018
• ISBN: 9781911027652

Josephine Corcoran

Josephine Corcoran was born in Southport and moved to London when she was 12, to live with an older sister, after the death of her mother. She now lives in Wiltshire. An Arvon course when she was 30 started her writing and she was a mature student at Bournemouth and Chichester Universities before studying for an MA in Creative Writing at UEA. Her work as a short story writer and playwright has been broadcast on BBC Radio 4 and a stage play has been produced in London. Josephine is founder and editor of the online journal And Other Poems and works as a writer in schools and community settings. Her pamphlet, The Misplaced House, was published by tall-lighthouse in 2014 and What Are You After? is her first full collection of poems.