Deathless
Catherine Balaq
Sex and death are truisms. We begin through the act of one and the other is the ultimate exit. Deathless, Catherine Balaq’s astonishing second collection, moves between the two, expanding on tropes of sexuality and creation acts with a core of sonnets that speak back to their origins. Both traditional and modern, the poems in Deathless turn the male gaze into the female subject and thrillingly place life’s darkness in chiaroscuro contrast with beauty and light.
“Intimate, open-hearted and blazingly honest, the poems in Deathless establish Balaq as a distinctive and engaging voice. Memory and survival; wit and invention; duty and wild abandon. It captures the beautiful and terrifying simultaneity of life: all of this is happening at once, is behind us, is coming our way.”
Luke Kennard
“In Deathless Catherine Balaq channels the daemon onto the page, painting colour from darkness. A unique voice of great energy, passion and talent.”
Paul Lynch ( Booker Prize winner 2023)
“Deathless turns a direct, unflinching gaze upon Freud’s twin drives – sex and death – and tracks the nuances of female desire, its ambivalences and contradictions, celebrating its incendiary agency with precision and control.”
Meryl Pugh
