Milk

‘Sublime’ – Donal Ryan, author of Strange Flowers

‘Here is a writer who matters’ – Irish Times

I have become the common myth. Mother. The sleepy hum of early memories. The smell of shampoo, of Olay, of lavender. The feeling of safety. The absence of fear.

When poet Alice Kinsella becomes a mother, she finds herself utterly lost. As she searches for answers to the question of her new identity, she considers the mothers and writers who came before her. In her inimitable poetic style, Kinsella takes pregnancy and the first nine months of motherhood and forms from them a broken prism through which to view both a woman’s place in the world, and her child’s in the future we’re creating.

‘A book about the raw, riotous, brutally beautiful act of being alive.’ – Kerri ní Dochartaigh, author of Thin Places

‘Milk is a raw, unvarnished journey down the mothering rabbit hole’ The Irish Independent

Author Biography

Alice Kinsella is a poet from Mayo, on the west coast of Ireland. She is the author of Sexy Fruit (Broken Sleep, 2018) and editor of Empty House: poetry and prose on the climate crisis (Doire Press, 2021). Milk (Picador, 2023) is her debut book of prose. She is an Arts Council of Ireland Next Generation Artist.