Impossible Heat

these basements that taught me to breathe;

my body happening in the space between moonlight &

the leather straps wrapped round an old dyke’s wrist

gender split open like a crass piñata on the sticky floor

Ciara Maguire’s poems explore the bright fields and dark corners of love. They are heartbreaking, sexy and addictive.

‘Impossible Heat is a work of claustrophobia, heat, and longing. Sexual ideation extends from the mind of the speaker to colour and consume everything. Long lines and rich cadences hold the reader in a vice, just as the speaker is offered no reprieve from her own intensity of feeling. Amidst the erotic, there is a profound hopelessness that doesn’t stop the poems being witty and manic, as the speaker struggles with privacy and performance, with a fear of perception but a desperate need to be perceived. The emotional incisiveness of this work is stark, its euphony sumptuous.’ Susannah Dickey

‘A nest-making of threads and mirrors, sapphic rorschachs revealing everything and nothing that might be told in the salt content of sweat and the tonguing indent of lyric. These generous poems drift through the gap someone left in your bedroom window. Here are dreams, tragedies of homosexuality, domestic horror shows, a cascade of utopian performatives, moonlight, a summer that may or may not ever end. What innocence is lost or won in love is felt in the sensory plenitude of our speaker’s imagination. Maguire is a master of anaphora, list and simile. Impossible Heat surrenders to its own melting, poems yielding magical hyperobjects which metabolise into tender adhesives, binding us irresistibly to this book. This is a work of devotion, connection, eclipse, desire and discovery. Its charm is quietly devastating.’ Maria Sledmere

Part of Little Betty 2024, curated by Anja Konig and Gboyega Odubanjo.