by Nell Osborne I live inside a dark cave that I fill up~ the décor is not at all prehistoric~ I painted a huge, basically naked portrait of myself looking furiously happy for the entrance~ no one can enter that doesn’t drop to the floor in admiration~ it’s a very fine painting on a technical level~ I drop my clothes onto the cave floor directly~ Nell Osborne’s Thank You For Everything is a collection of poems, appointments, wiggle rooms, self-help guides, dialogue scraps, and misery chambers. It skewers the idea of the ‘poet’s voice’ with drab ease, and then skewers that. By turns oblique, seductive, and silly, here is a melancomic portrait of existence in 2024/5. ‘If like Freud’s idea of hysteria – itself dead in the water – behind every symptom is a hidden pain, so too for poetry: its lyric self-seriousness and verbiage, failed addresses so often repurposed from the corporate and platform voices that shape civic emotion, its ‘personals’ and ‘personalities’. Thank You For Everything is an act of love for poetry, Nell Osborne going in slantways, ripping and rippling through “tilling sulky cockle shoals” to circle what remains, making me laugh, so much – I love the poems tuning in and out of these voices, written by a rare and liberatory mind.’ — Lucy Mercer ‘I hate poetry that smirks as it re-describes the administered world, all that alienation wrapped up in rictus dayglo. But Nell Osborne makes wisdom blush and wit look like slapstick, and it all seems possible, scuffed and crude and stinging. “writing is for staying insufferable.” And don't you forget it.’ — Luke Roberts
