Impossible Heat

these basements that taught me to breathe; my body happening in the space between moonlight & the leather straps wrapped round an old dyke’s wrist gender split open like a crass piñata on the sticky floor

Ciara Maguire’s poems explore the bright fields and dark corners of love. They are heartbreaking, sexy and addictive.

‘Impossible Heat is a work of claustrophobia, heat, and longing. Sexual ideation extends from the mind of the speaker to colour and consume everything. Long lines and rich cadences hold the reader in a vice, just as the speaker is offered no reprieve from her own intensity of feeling. Amidst the erotic, there is a profound hopelessness that doesn’t stop the poems being witty and manic, as the speaker struggles with privacy and performance, with a fear of perception but a desperate need to be perceived. The emotional incisiveness of this work is stark, its euphony sumptuous.’ Susannah Dickey