The Stack of Owls is Getting Higher

In a sequence of poems set in the mountainous Deep South of America, Dawn Watson vividly evokes an ominous landscape of gas stations, jackrabbits and drifting hawks, where copperhead snakes fall out of branches and 'magnolia cones / thum[p] the roofs' of wooden outhouses. These poems, based on the writer's time spent in Georgia, Tennessee and the Carolinas, are interwoven with pieces set in the poet's native Belfast which speak urgently to the raw realities of sexuality, juvenile detention, and the Irish border. Many poems feature speakers driving from place to place, capturing the in-between states in which so much of experience is actually lived. Precise and strange images coalesce into physical and interior landscapes. Alternately surreal and direct, and always joyously inventive, Watson offers a clear and unsettling vision of what is and isn't there in these anxious, contemporary times.

Dawn Watson is a writer from Belfast. She is currently a PhD candidate at Queen's University, writing a prose poem novel and researching prose poetics. She worked as a sub editor in newspapers such as The Sunday Times in London, The News of the World in Dublin and The Mirror in Belfast. She completed a Masters in Poetry at the Seamus Heaney Centre in 2018 after winning the Ruth West Poetry Scholarship. She was a 2018 Poetry Ireland Introductions Series poet and won the Doolin Writers' Poetry Award in the same year. Her writing has been published in journals including The Manchester Review, Blackbox Manifold, The Stinging Fly, The Moth and The Tangerine. She lives in Belfast with her wife, and has a son, Art.