Awards

• Commended for Poetry Book Society Recommendation 2026

Overview

Full Product Details

9781800175426

Table of Contents

Reviews

‘Before Violence charts ideas around fate and lineages, and how we can, or can’t, interrupt what might lie in wait for us. Skies are brought into proximity with glowing bodies of water, the parts of the body closest to our intimacies with other people – hands and faces – are positioned as recipients of care and violence, and capable of complicity in both. The poems play with scale and time to create a forceful narrative that moves from childhood to adulthood, and thinks towards the various futures that close and open to us through a structure that initially cracks, then reassembles. This book is an elegy to personal histories, and a long ode to making peace with hopeful pathways.’ Rachael Allen

Author Information

Joe Carrick-Varty is a British–Irish poet whose work has appeared in the New Statesman, Granta and POETRY. His debut book, More Sky, was named a Best Poetry Collection of the Year by The Irish Times, won an Eric Gregory Award from the Society of Authors, and was shortlisted for both the T.S. Eliot Prize and the Michael Murphy Memorial Prize. His second book, Before Violence, is a Poetry Book Society Recommendation.

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