The Dead Queen of Bohemia is a journey through a life lived on the edge. With a poetic style influenced by Gertrude Stein and William Burroughs, this collection is woven with surrealistic imagery that is both unflinching and dislocating.

Fagan's poetry is raw and tough yet beautiful and tender and with themes of loss and recovery, hope and defiance, represents a clarion call from a self-taught poet who started writing at the age of seven and so far has not stopped. The Dead Queen of Bohemia documents the progression of a voice and a life written over the last twenty years. It opens with Jenni's most recent work and includes her previous two collections, both now out of print.



Jenni Fagan is an award-winning author, poet, screenwriter, essayist and a playwright, and was writer in residence at the University of Edinburgh. In 2013 Jenni was the only Scottish writer to be on Granta's Best of Young British Novelists list. She is the author of The Panopticon (2012), The Sunlight Pilgrims (2015) and her first poetry collection The Dead Queen of Bohemia was published by Polygon in 2016, followed by There's a Witch in the Word Machine (2018).



'A world of dive bars and old cinemas, roll-ups and homemade cherry wine, hangovers and tenements, moons and caravan parks. It is easy to get giddy on Fagan's imagery'



'Fagan handles this more elastic form with skill ... memorable and visceral, with deft changes of register'



'If you like Bukowski and the Beats, you'll get somewhere close to the subject matter and style, both of which are pleasingly uncompromising'



'Somehow manages to be comforting and disturbing at the same time - the poetic version of what a strong hash brownie might do to your brain'