MX SIMP

‘Some of the strongest poems written have belonged to the poetry of witness. I would put Kate Hendry’s MX SIMP in this category. Recording her journey through breast cancer, her poems have the same vivid, wrenching effect on the reader as the poems Wilfred Owen wrote about his experience of war. They approach the darkest moments with an ironic wit. They are the poems of a poet fully alive to her senses, finding, like Owen, an imagery and language to describe the almost indescribable.’ Vicki Feaver

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AUTOCORRECT

I must have typed chemotherapy 
so often my phone’s decided
it’s the only c-h- word I know.

It thinks it’s helping by hijacking
my thoughts. Doesn’t believe
I want to type chain
and chink and Chattanooga.

I try to say once, as in once upon 
a time or once this is all over 
but it insists on oncologist.

It’s got me on c-a- words too –
give me cancer so eagerly,
as if the word’s caught
the tip of my tongue.

How many times must I write
cargo, cavalry, capacious
before it shuts up?

THE LOST ORIGINAL

‘A debut collection which uses such directness to create deeply affecting poems that take the familiar and the everyday, and turn them into something new, something profound, and often something unsettling.‘ Kylie Grant, Glasgow Review of Books, 2016

Available to buy from Happenstance Press