So Mayer’s third published poetry collection, (O), is a bittersweet lovesong to zombies, tattoos, lovers and sisters, Katniss and Pussy Riot, Artemis and suffragists. In three parts — I DO, I UNDO, I REDO — the poet undoes themselves and all around them in a cycle that takes them back to the start as it comes to an end. Spirited, politicised, contemporary and Classical, these poems bring a poetic voice to the women that have lived in the cracks of history. In their own words: Nothing — and everything — is sacred in this new cosmogony, beginning again with O.

Arc Publications, June 2015