Life Immediately

Life Immediately is a dynamic debut collection containing womanhood, music, the natural world and the comedy and calamity of human relationships. Lily Blacksell’s writing showcases the expansiveness of language, but also its failures. Communication builds up and breaks down, geese honk, hangovers linger in poems where observation is balanced with insouciance.

‘Riotous, creatively quixotic, both funny and deadly serious, Lily Blacksell's poetry is the result of a hyperintelligent imagination striving to find a voice that is as various and playful as the self. A voice 'presenting the play of my skull, intact', which has the marvellous effect of relighting the known world.' – Richard Scott

‘The collection won me over with its unique imagination that takes the everyday and gives it a fresh inside-out. The mundane can be astonishing or even more mundane, if that’s possible, in a poetry that’s hilarious and complex, witty and wise, understated and extravagant. A rare talent brimming with charm and mischief!’ – Daljit Nagra

‘These fresh, unegoistic and buoyant poems make the familiar funnier and more meaningful at once. Full of cracking one liners and uncanny imagery, it is a mood-altering collection that will successfully recruit the reader into its hunt for the unparaphrasable worthwhileness of life..’ – Caoilinn Hughes

‘‘With its amusement park of a heart, mercurial wit, and sprightliness of a wild Appaloosa, Lily Blacksell’s poetry is impossible to predict – and even harder to resist. As true to its name as printed matter can be, Life Immediately is the most purely enjoyable collection I have read in years.’ – Timothy Donnelly

‘Poetry that's remarkably and uniquely tuned to the social, to sensations, to the natural comedy in womanhood, and to the personal art of daily existence.’ – Holly Pester