It Takes Time to Build Castles

It Takes Time to Build Castles is a raw and evocative exploration of memory, survival, and self-reclamation. Through a tapestry of poems, Sky Dair crafts a deeply personal yet universally resonant journey—one shaped by familial bonds, the weight of inheritance, and the ever-changing landscape of home.

Set against the backdrop of North London estates, Irish heritage, and transient spaces, the collection navigates the complexities of love and loss, violence and tenderness, exile and belonging. Dair’s voice moves seamlessly between stark reality and lyrical introspection, chronicling a coming-of-age shaped by displacement, trauma, and the search for autonomy.

Themes of matrilineality, class, control, and recovery thread through the work, as Dair grapples with the echoes of the past while forging a future defined on her own terms. Balancing stark honesty with moments of quiet beauty, It Takes Time to Build Castles is both a testament to survival and a love letter to the self—one that refuses to be silenced.

‘Dair has shown us how in the home, words were often used as instruments of torture or control, missiles designed to wound. But as the collection comes to a close, we see how they become the building blocks for a newly autonomous life.’— Octavia Bright, author of This Ragged Grace

Poetry Collection
With Afterword by Octavia Bright

Sky Dair (she/her) is a writer, filmmaker and musician from London. Her practice focuses on the presence of catharsis within the act of making and thinking. She is interested in the intersection and collaging of video, photography, audio and language as a vessel to explore emotional release. 

In 2025, Worms Publishing brings a cohort of experimental writers to the literary top-soil with the introduction of a new series of books, written by London’s emerging visionaries of the literary, dramatic and poetic. Conceptualised with a shared recognition on how words can bridge and bind, we are thrilled to announce the series, Silk. Working across form and genre to showcase writers outside of conventional publishing, Worms endeavours to support and cultivate underrepresented voices with a focus on female and non-binary authors and artists.