Rachael Allen & Lucy Mercer: God Complex/Emblem

‘Here is a wasteland / of parched aesthetics / patched up with modern tubes’ – Rachael Allen’s long-awaited second collection, God Complex, is a long narrative poem describing the breakdown of a relationship against a backdrop of environmental degradation and toxicity. She read from the collection, and was in conversation with the poet Lucy Mercer, whose first collection is Emblem (Prototype, 2022).