Overview

An evocative journey of self-discovery and reclamation in the wake of divorce Winner of the Jerwood Prize for Best First Poetry Collection, granted by Forward Arts Foundation (UK) Shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize (UK) This fresh, dynamic debut poetry book from award-winning poet Isabelle Baafi explores the transformative journey of redefining one's identity following trauma and upheaval. This conversational collection simmers with energy and immediacy as it interrogates how much our identity is determined by the circumstances into which we are born. The book's five sections travel backwards and forwards in time: asking urgent questions of self-knowledge and change during a marital breakdown, revisiting the formation of a moral compass during childhood, navigating the pitfalls of powerlessness and conformity during adolescence, charting the rise and fall of a passionate marriage, and seeking revitalisation in the wake of divorce. Visceral scenes from childhood and adolescence are set against deeply resonant moments of love blossoming and love dying to explore desire, power, and self-perception in unexpected ways. This exquisite and moving collection marks the emergence of a distinctive poetic voice. [Sample Poem] The way you say pen After Irene P. Mathieu's 'Soil' it sounds like pain, as in all I ever wanted was to live by my pain. If you want to raze a city, all you need is some paper and a good pain. You once said that a woman with a pain is like a gun who soon finds more targets than mercy. Every day I lost another pain, but you gave me another to take its place. A child starts out writing in pencil, but mastery is rewarded with a pain. Aged six, first trip without Dad, my legs the canvas: lightning scratched into me with my mother's pain. My shadow from the day I learned to skip with bloodied knees - she was my pain pal all this time. The pain is mightier than the sword, and twice as likely to punish its owner. What a luxury and a curse, to live and die by the torrent of my pain. Rainclouds surround the registry. Organza-veiled and blister-footed, I am yours with the flick of a pain. 'Fill out in block capitals with black ink.' Some truths are only valid when the right pain tells them.

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9780819501806

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Reviews

""Isabelle Baafi chronicles the breakdown of her marriage and uncovers the marks of adolescent trauma in this incisive, fresh debut. Baafi plays with chronologies and tests the capacity of poetic form as she interrogates her own past. Through five deeply felt sections that magnify slices of time, she excavates the pieces of memory that make up a life.""--Sklyar Miklus, Electric Literature, Most Anticipated Debut Poetry of 2025 ""With sure formal dexterity and an exciting precision of lyrical imagining, Baafi explores the complicated pathways of suspicion and uncertainty, and - most vitally - the simultaneous possibilities of threat and beauty, mistrust and hope, darkness and joy. The knowing narrative detail is charged as strongly with ideas as with feeling, resulting in a highly original fusion of resistance and compassionate determination.""--Jane Draycott, author of The Kingdom ""In this wise-hearted and deft debut, Baafi gets to the grain of family, inheritance, the grit of growing up and the grappling to become oneself.""--Rachel Long, author of My Darling from the Lions ""Isabelle Baafi's Chaotic Good is a debut of amazing endurance. Its formal pressures create a kind of kaleidoscopic intensity that - with each turn of the chamber - brings newly beautiful and painful shapes into focus.""--Will Harris, author of Brother Poem ""Chaotic Good offers beautiful, urgent poems to remake our breaking world. From the playground all the way to the marriage bed, these redemption songs return to heal and emancipate.""--alice hiller, author of bird of winter

""Isabelle Baafi chronicles the breakdown of her marriage and uncovers the marks of adolescent trauma in this incisive, fresh debut. Baafi plays with chronologies and tests the capacity of poetic form as she interrogates her own past. Through five deeply felt sections that magnify slices of time, she excavates the pieces of memory that make up a life.""--Sklyar Miklus, Electric Literature, Most Anticipated Debut Poetry of 2025 ""With language that surprises and plays, Chaotic Good lyrically and adeptly demonstrates that the tragedy of familial and romantic heartbreak may only be as far from reinvention and self-determination as a subtle yet critical shift in words, and as close as within the one speaking them. Deft in its examination of empowerment and self-discovery, this collection is a smart, moving, and worthy read.""--Karen Sherk Chio, Colorado Review ""Isabelle Baafi's Chaotic Good (Faber), a dissection of a toxic marriage that is at once playful and sharp, stood alone as the Forward prize's best first collection.""--Rishi Dastidar, The Guardian, ""The best poetry books of 2025"" ""With sure formal dexterity and an exciting precision of lyrical imagining, Baafi explores the complicated pathways of suspicion and uncertainty, and - most vitally - the simultaneous possibilities of threat and beauty, mistrust and hope, darkness and joy. The knowing narrative detail is charged as strongly with ideas as with feeling, resulting in a highly original fusion of resistance and compassionate determination.""--Jane Draycott, author of The Kingdom ""In this wise-hearted and deft debut, Baafi gets to the grain of family, inheritance, the grit of growing up and the grappling to become oneself.""--Rachel Long, author of My Darling from the Lions ""Isabelle Baafi's Chaotic Good is a debut of amazing endurance. Its formal pressures create a kind of kaleidoscopic intensity that - with each turn of the chamber - brings newly beautiful and painful shapes into focus.""--Will Harris, author of Brother Poem ""Chaotic Good offers beautiful, urgent poems to remake our breaking world. From the playground all the way to the marriage bed, these redemption songs return to heal and emancipate.""--alice hiller, author of bird of winter

Author Information

ISABELLE BAAFI's writing has been published in the Times Literary Supplement, The Poetry Review, The London Magazine, Aesthetica Magazine, Oxford Poetry, and elsewhere. Her debut Ripe (2020), won a Somerset Maugham Award and was a Poetry Book Society Pamphlet Choice. She is the Reviews Editor at Poetry London, a Ledbury Poetry Critic, an Obsidian Foundation Fellow, and an editor at Magma.

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