Awards

• Winner of Poetry Book Society Recommendation Spring 2025 2025

Overview

Poetry Book Society Recommendation 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 ""Desree is one of the brightest of us. Through masterful juxtapositions, humour and surrealism, her poems act as a hallway: the reader drops off selves they didn't realise they were carrying, and returns, new and re-accepted into their own arms. Epiphanies shift our world a few inches to the left. For those of us who wonder if we've been 'turned off at the wall': Altar says 'sis', and does the speaking for all of us."" Kareem Parkins-Brown

Full Product Details

9781913268725

Table of Contents

Reviews

""Desree is one of the brightest of us, and Altar allows us to take in her genius. Through masterful juxtapositions, humour and surrealism, these poems act as a hallway: the reader drops off selves they didn't realise they were carrying, and returns, new and re-accepted into their own arms. Epiphanies shift your world a few inches to the left: disturbed enough for you to take notice but still function. For those of us who wonder if we've been 'turned off at the wall': this collection says 'sis', and does the speaking for all of us."" Kareem Parkins-Brown ""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

Author Information

Desree is an award-winning writer, spoken word artist, educator and producer based in London and Slough. An alumna of Born: Free Writers Collective, Jerwood Arts and the Obsidian Foundation, Desree was Poet in Residence at Glastonbury Festival 2022 and Slough's EMPOWORD. A familiar voice on BBC Radio Berkshire, her work has been broadcast on Radio 4's The Life and Rhymes of Benjamin Zephaniah; and published in JOY//US Poems of Queer Joy, Ink Sweat & Tears, Spoken Word London's Anti-Hate Anthology and more. She performs across the UK and internationally. Her sell-out self-published pamphlet, I Find My Strength in Simple Things (2017) was published in second edition by Burning Eye Books in 2021. Altar is her first collection.

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