Self Heal

An exciting and eagerly anticipated full-collection debut from a hugely talented poet. “Exuberantly raw and playful, Samantha Walton’s first collection Self Heal engages passionately with questions of identity, consumerism, gender, and humanity’s relationship to the natural environment. To self heal means to live amid a dizzying array of worldly demands, requiring all the abundance of humour, compassion, and intelligence this debut has to offer.”

Carrie Etter

“Here it is, the long-awaited collection by Samantha Walton! Self Heal is infused with passion and politics — you could say that the poems are love poems, but unlike any you’ve read. With exhilarating wit, Walton declares the exchanges, vital or aggrieved, between the living stuff of the world: ‘the swabbed mystery of the connection/ between your body & the gross/ understatement of your environment’. These brilliant, acutely beautiful, deliciously mordant poems will tendril their way into your psyche.” Lila Matsumoto

“You can open up your head and rub these poems on your brain when you want to feel better about the wreck: they’re “heal” poems, as the title says: Samantha Walton’s Self Heal opens to what blows between working streets and windy sky: “under the scolded / boots of the Poor Law / press the kissed field” and out comes love “to rub a mind across a meadow” in the company of saucy language bodies saying “call me / x”.” Lisa Samuels, author of Symphony for Human Transport and Foreign Native

Author Biography

Samantha Walton co-runs Sad Press, which specialises in chapbooks and small press editions, and has previously published five pamphlets including Animal Pomes with Crater Press. She was a Poet in Residence at the ESRC Genomics Policy and Research Forum in 2013, and in July 2015 was Poet in Residence at SoundEye Poetry Festival in Cork, Ireland. She teaches at Bath Spa University.