Reviews and endorsements of Katrina's first full collection 'The Girl with the Cactus Handshake' - (Nov 2009):

 

'Naomi’s poems often establish surprising contexts from which to explore the intimate codes of relationships. The farmer’s boy is up and away or a woman recollects lying on the floor of a pub with a man while her partner watches. Allusions and an acute psychological interrogation make the poems incisive and unpredictable and keep us on our toes for the possible mischief ahead. This arresting and vivid first collection is full of dark humour and affectionate address to dark circumstances.'

The judges of the 2010 London Fringe Festival New Poetry Award (Daljit Nagra, Tamar Yosselof, Adam O'Riordan)

 

'This impressive collection is rich with colour, black comedy, and surprise. Katrina Naomi's inventive work locates a "beauty, a balance in watching" as it explores unusual lives at
key moments. These are poems as eye-opening, twisted fictions, in which B-movie girls, clairvoyants, sailors, psychobilly rockers, and lonely zookeepers feed their desires as best they can. This captivating book offers a riotously imaginative landscape - sometimes lush, sometimes prickly, and often rooted in delicious noir. Naomi's version of pastoral is not one you'll soon shake off.'

Todd Swift

'Katrina Naomi's poems are fresh and surprising - they're user-friendly, willing to link arms with you, but then they tug you along in unlikely directions. With their sharp diction, salt tang, blend of dark and light, and their unexpected last lines, these are satisfying pieces which dock in the memory.'

Roddy Lumsden

'Katrina Naomi's poems take off from an eerily familiar inner-urban childhood and spiky estuary-hinterland adolescence, to explore, among other unlikely destinations, Brassai's Parisian underworld, pre-Castro Cuba, ice-bound Newfoundland: daring flights shadowed with edgy, deep, intimate foreboding.'

Anne-Marie Fyfe

'Katrina Naomi has an enviable gift for capturing a scene in a few deft strokes. She also has a unique way with imagery.' David Cooke writing in 'The North' (issue No 48 Dec 2011/Jan 2012)

Two more reviews:

'a felicity of spot-on observation'... read Tom Phillips' review of 'The Girl with the Cactus Handshake' (March 2010) on the cultural blog Eyewear.

'prickles and sparks with the energy and power of poetry at its best'...see Sarah Leavesley's review of 'The Girl with the Cactus Handshake' (Feb 2010) on the writer's website Writelink.

Reviews and endorsements of Katrina's latest pamphlet 'Charlotte Bronte's Corset' - (April 2010):

'Charlotte Bronte's Corset is sensitive, sometimes provocative, its non-reverential tone wry and refreshing. Katrina's almost 'forensic' examination of the Bronte relics explores them through new eyes, challenging our over-familiarity with the Bronte myths. Yet she is also drawn to the present life of the Parsonage, and her poems vividly re-imagine life behind the scenes of a museum dedicated to literary genius.'

Jenna Holmes (Contemporary Arts Officer, Bronte Parsonage Museum)

'These poems are so good.' (Novelist Barbara Trapido)

'Charlotte Bronte's Corset is not just about the Brontes, or even the museum. In this creative setting, Katrina Naomi has been able to map out her own creative force.' Tara Hanks

'This subtle, evocative collection bears endless readings...' Read the Barcelona-based Bronte Blog's review of 'Charlotte Bronte's Corset' Bronte Blog.

 

Reviews and endorsements of Katrina's pamphlet 'Lunch at the Elephant & Castle' (Oct 08):

'It’s rare that you read a collection of poems and actually want to meet the poet. But Katrina Naomi’s personality comes through so strikingly in Lunch at the Elephant & Castle where she recollects instances from a life that we can all relate to. These recollections are frequently convincing, generous and infused with a tenderness that is the very cornerstone of her poetry.'

James Byrne, Editor, The Wolf Magazine

'Katrina Naomi is not afraid to take risks and knows how to “tell it slant”. So her restlessly varied and wide-ranging poems - whether touching, shocking, entertaining, compassionate or sinister - have a vital freshness.'

Michael Laskey

'Katrina Naomi...has the chatty, confiding tone of a friend taking you aside for a natter or an entre nous revelation - 'I can't think why', 'I say "my", he was anyone's'. There's a great deal of the gossip's guilty pleasure to be had picking over the matter of the poems - the dodgem-driving bit of rough on his 'shag break', the 'afternoon sex/on a Spanish bed', the matching pair of fathers who let down their child in contrasting ways - but the poems go deeper than confessional anecdote. By assuming alternate identities, Naomi opens up a wider and more objective world through the voices of an Ethiopian chanteuse, a Reggie Perrinesque bolter and - most unsettlingly - a balaclava-clad breaker and enterer who seems to be solving the problem of the housing shortage by 'disappearing' sitting tenants on commission with a lockpick and pillow. If a debut poet's pamphlet is a showcase of her technique, the range of formal, imaginative and rhetorical skills on display here suggest that the wait for this author's first full collection will be a short one.'

Julia Bird, writing in the autumn 2009 edition of Poetry London

‘This is a vivid and vibrant collection. Naomi’s voice is distinct and definite, her touch certain yet gentle. The poems range through time and space and often the poet uses the first person, although the voice which speaks is not always her own. There is restlessness to this collection, a sense of the poet relocating, reconfiguring loss, travelling through experience - but at no point are there elements of - all too common these days - self-indulgence or sentimentality. Stand out poems include "Tunnel of Love": we bobbed, as one/bashed into the fake grass/and the fibre glass cave, together, and "The Night Club": The man in drag is Jordanesque./Breasts scaffolded, squashed into silver/sequins. Long, black beehived hair. "Picnic" also held my interest: I wonder if it’ll work,/this day with its promise/of sex and a lazy river. For a first collection this is assured and confident. Naomi has a way of making the language really work for her, and despite the fact that the collection is marginally let down by some weaker moments, this deserves to be very well-received. '

Victoria Buckley, The Frogmore Papers, no. 73, Spring 2009.

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