Lovebug

  • The pathogen arrives anyway and takes a seat at the table. Conditioned to welcome damage, I am curious about this uninvited guest. You must sit down, says Love, and taste my meat.

    ‘A brilliant and engrossing poetic meditation on the self that places its multitudes under a kaleidoscopic microscope. Lovebug takes up the risks involved in living and loving, as well as the radical vulnerability required to be open to the spectrum of intensities – from animating to infecting – that lead to irrevocable change.’ ­– Nuar Alsadir

    Lovebug is a wonder. With her warm, welcoming intelligence and razor-sharp prose, Daisy Lafarge moves from microbiology to poetry, from chronic illness to crushing desire. Lovebug is at once a work of critical theory, an intellectual biography, and a detective story, in which nothing less is at stake than the mystery of our connection to one another. It’s also that rare find: a serious book that’s impossible to put down, infectious in the very best sense of the word.’ – Anahid Nersessian

    Lovebug is savagely brilliant. Every page is teeming with the horror and glory of life. Lafarge’s writing is rigorous, relentless, revelatory, and, yes, exquisitely beautiful. Possibly perfect. I would say I devoured this book – but really, the book devoured me.’– Elvia Wilk

    Lovebug combines the delicate intricacy of a microbial network, the pathogenic force of a virus and the infectious pleasure of great writing. Give yourself the day in bed to read it, and the next one to recover.’ – Josh Cohen

    ‘Daisy Lafarge’s meditations on sites literary and biochemical, topics messy and divine, delight in their learnedness and unabashed love of risk. A pleasure read, as well as a virtuosic chain of devotional images, Lovebug will make you think very differently about bodies, sex, food, and the variousness of life on earth.’ ­– Lucy Ives

Life Without Air

  • Shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize 2020

    Scottish Poetry Book of the Year 2021

    A Poetry Book Society Recommendation

    Shortlisted for the John Pollard International Poetry Prize

    Longlisted for The Laurel Prize

    ‘‘To encounter Daisy Lafarge’s Life Without Air is to be plunged into a cosmos radically at odds with itself… This is a collection in which things inexplicably disappear (the “opinions” of men with “ideas”, for example, who wake to discover themselves “on the wrong side of history”). Into these resonant gaps, Lafarge pitches her restless, philosophical enquiry, suffused with existential anxiety at the end of the Industrial Age… Mercurial, ingenious, and prophetic, this is poetry of and for our off-kilter times’
    — Sinéad Morrissey

    ‘Lafarge’s poetry has this absorbing quality to it: a sense of a weight of thought and feeling behind its choice of words, the form of its phrases … It reads like a high-wire walk among vistas of ‘the normalised quiet of unseen power’, in between twin poles of detachment and immersion.’ — MAP

    ‘Lafarge’s is a fierce, clear-eyed poetry that expresses the sticky relationality between human pain and non-human destruction; the unsettling intimacy of our shared afflictions.’ — Guardian

    More info at Granta

Paul

  • A New York Times Editor’s Choice

    Betty Trask Award 2019

    ‘Taut and lyrical’ — Chloe Aridjis

    ‘Light and fast-moving … [A] beautifully constructed novel’
    Guardian

    ‘Immersive, maddening, unsettling’ — Irish Times

    Paul’s strength is in the insidiousness of its titular character, perfectly balanced by the malleability of its protagonist, and her willingness to identify herself through others’ eyes… Lafarge’s writing really shines… Paul’s many layers of imbalance cover language and voice, complicity, age, and life experience’ — Evening Standard

    ‘Arresting… A white-knuckle ride not because of any attendant thrills and spills but because the tension is perpetually on the brink of boiling, and then boiling over’
    i Paper

    ‘Hypnotic… A formidable and heady novel… [it’s] almost impossible to put the book down’ — The Fountain

    More info at Riverhead

    More info at Granta

capriccio (pamphlet)

  • ‘Daisy Lafarge's capriccio is a beautiful, hilarious, hallucinatory folly. Like all truly fresh poems, it 'snacks on itself' in order to sustain its vision of 'luminous babies', 'tesserae of zucchini', 'sea urchin nipple tassels', and the many other news items 'rocky perception' brings us. It poses past and present selves for an awkward family portrait in front of the dehiscent green screen of the future, with captions like: 'Achieving climate zen.' After reading it I was left with a feeling of great doubt as to what a poem is. Snit snit!’ — Oli Hazzard

    capriccio wakes up in tricks and ploys too early and too late, improvising on the runway pulled from underneath us. The book’s stuttered feeds latch on shocks of counterfactual pleasure, joy, and rage, gathering the newsy torrent of wrong posts and messages from the so-called outside into an oblique momentum all its own. ‘A text you wanted – didn’t want – to arrive, arrives.’: lines like plane debris dispersed wide and far through the disaster and the aftermath of capital, a Cheshire grin on every face. I’m listening in these earphones when out of the corner of my eye I spy a mystic or a fool, reaching for a social life.’
    — Dom Hale

    Listen to a discussion of capriccio on SPAM’s podcast URL Sonata with Kirsty Dunlop, Maria Sledmere, Max Parnell and Rhian Williams.