On October 5th, in the Irish Writers Centre, the Turas Press joint book launch of poetry and short stories celebrated the release of Liz McSkeane‘s short story collection, What to Put in a Suitcase; and the haunting book of poetry from Róisín Tierney, Tiger Moth, first launched in London on April 5th.
What to Put in a Suitcase by Liz McSkeane
What to Put in a Suitcase contains sixteen stories which have already attracted significant praise:
The world of What to Put in a Suitcase is a very uncertain place, full of uncomfortable questions. These are stories written in spare, pared-back language, with images that startle, packed with interior monologues that are rich with insight and observation and reflect the challenges of modern life: immigration, the pandemic, violence against women, society’s many inequalities. Catherine Dunne
In the hands of Liz McSkeane, the everyday ‒ a café terrace, a deserted corridor, an oriental rug, an airport lounge ‒ can be abruptly transformed into a site of conflict and menace. Always meticulous in her choice of language, these stories show her skill in evoking our primal emotions. David Butler
This is a brilliant, incisive collection of contemporary short stories, startling and unsettling in their profound reflections on the complexities of modern life. Lisa Harding
Readers who would like to get a taster of the collection can read A Hot Coffee which appeared in The Irish Times Online on Christmas Day 2021; and another story, Lebensraum, which appeared in Books Ireland Magazine in March.
Tiger Moth by Róisín Tierney
Róisín Tierney who was born in Dublin, has lived in Ireland, Spain and is now based in London. Her fourth collection, Tiger Moth has been widely praised and very favourably reviewed:
These unsettling, dark lyrics have a wonderful verbal energy; a mythic imagination. Snowberries have a ‘pale gleam’, a ‘halo’, a texture like ‘a mortician gently filling a bruise.’ Insects and birds come as harbingers, as though from another world, and are both read as symbols and also dexterous in their evasion of the speaker’s quest for applied meaning. Through a careful balancing, Tierney manages to chart the mind’s search for significance with poems seeking similarities between the natural world and the traumas of human life. Seán Hewitt in The Irish Times
There are poems in Tiger Moth that attend to the natural world with a close, exacting sensibility; others bring a fine, lyric vitality to narratives of childhood and elegies for a sister – a looking back that is clear-eyed, loving, unsentimental, and redemptive. Greta Stoddart
Here is one of the magical poems from Tiger Moth.
Highlights of Joint Book Launch Poetry & Short Stories!
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