Katrina Naomi

This Spring issue of Hinterland celebrates the limitless reach of life writing. Between them, our writers explore adoption, suicide, sexual assault, the AIDS crisis, conscription, grandparents, trauma, and the enduring influence of Elizabeth Bishop. Headlining this issue we celebrate a work seminal to the genre of life writing: Lorna Sage’s Bad Blood, with a collection of exclusive-to-Hinterland pieces by Christopher Bigsby, Victor Sage and Sharon Tolaini-Sage, with a foreword by Kathryn Hughes, that illuminate and respond to the legacy of Sage’s memoir, now entering its third decade of continuous publication.

In Battery Rocks Katrina Naomi returns to the Cornish swimming spot – Battery Rocks in Penzance – every day for a year. On each swim, she finds something fresh and invigorating, whether this is an encounter with a bull seal, an insight into the conflict in Palestine, or a realisation about herself.Alongside poems exploring the sea in all its mercurial forms – rough and calm, wild and healing – she examines issues of fear, strength and vulnerability. Writing in response to an attempted rape and other experienced attacks, she questions how she can feel safer alone, in a raging sea in winter, in nothing but a swimming costume, than on dry land.These poems also approach the climate emergency from aslant, offering several new takes on one of the most pressing concerns of our times. Finding joy through immersion in nature, Battery Rocks is a thoughtful meditation on nature, risk, swimming and the sea.

Katrina Naomi’s poetry collection, Wild Persistence, written after a move from London to Cornwall, considers distance and closeness, and questions how to live. She dissects ‘dualism’ and arrival, sex and dance, a trip to Japan. There is a strong section of poems about the aftermath of an attempted rape. Her voice is convincing and contemporary.

If Alice landed in London not Wonderland this book might be the result—picture and word weft and warp to create an alchemic (rabbit) whole. On one page, the image of an alien costume—hanging surreally beside a school uniform on a washing line—accompanies a poem about fleeing suburbia. On another, a poem about seeking asylum accompanies the image of another 'alien' on an urban train. Woven through with themes of queerness and love, spun from heartfelt emotion and embroidered with humour, Threads will leave you aching with longing and laughter.

Katrina Naomi’s The Way the Crocodile Taught Me is the eagerly-awaited second collection by this lively and popular poet. With warmth, flair and a certain ferocious wit, Naomi tears into her subject matter: a childhood fraught with dislocation and violence but also redeemed by more tender memories of a sister and a kindly, although at times comically obtuse, grandmother. In the first half we meet the family which also includes: an often glamorous mother, a truly scary stepfather and the sort of relatives where one can expect fistfights to erupt at family weddings. The second half of the book is informed by the tragi-comic events of the first and includes: a bleak hotel, an attempted rape and a description of the sadistic relish with which the Kray twins dispatched their victims. The Way the Crocodile Taught Me will delight people who know Naomi’s work and undoubtedly win new fans for her courageous and unabashedly entertaining poems.