Altar

Poetry Book Society Recommendation

darling slough,

i love you like rain.

graveyard with no tombstones.

adventure playground some children

play on, others lie underneath.

i can’t walk through the newbuilds

without hearing the men i loved

bleating inside you.

The debut poetry collection from award-winning writer and spoken word artist, Desree, Altar explores multifaceted dimensions of sacrifice, challenging its heroism and examining its ties to servility. The poems in Altar urge their protagonists to play neither lion nor lamb, but to live and flourish on their own terms. Each page glimmers with vivid, often devastating vignettes: we witness the resilience of youth, the strength of the Black female body, the complexity of chosen and unchosen family, the sweeping effects of gentrification. Through reflections on Black British identity, queer joy, place and belonging, faith and consent, Desree invites the reader on a journey of reclamation, while her wry wit and disarming tenderness hold us through the necessary storms that mark the way.

“A collection of wonder and witness. These poems — both powerful and tender — grapple with the parallels of life and death, the body and spirit, loss and love, and demand a response.” Rachel Long

“This is thrilling writing. Unexpected, alive, and curious. Desree enters the page, stage left.” Joelle Taylor

“Gorgeous in its redefining of self.” Yomi Ṣode

“Altar has so much of what I love about poetry. Masterful juxtapositions, humour and surrealism; epiphanies that shift your world a few inches to the left – enough for you to notice but still function. For those of us who wonder if we’ve been ‘turned off at the wall’, Desree’s poems act as a hallway: we drop off selves we didn’t realise we were carrying, and return, new and re-accepted into our own arms. Desree is one of the brightest of us, and Altar allows us to take in her genius.” Kareem Parkins-Brown