Glass (2019) reports from the battlefield of gender and the workplace. It tells stories with imperfect endings, set in a complex landscape of ceilings, cliffs and closets; witnesses dialogues between power, fragility, invisibility and constraint. This is poetic material both solid and splintered, confusing and clear; testimony related with a keen ear and a contemplative voice, a dispatch from the frontline of contemporary working life.
Addressing experiences of displacement and connection to both place and to people, the poems in Navigation traverse landscape and memory, mingling the two. From the sediments of natural structures to the erosion of memory, Kate Carruthers Thomas uses beautifully controlled metaphor to explore the tensions between familiarity and strangeness, whether in how we perceive the world or is the changing dynamics relationships. Poised, honed and sharply observed, with a feeling for what goes on beneath the surface of things, Navigation is an outstanding debut collection.