Lydia Unsworth is a poet from
Manchester, UK. Her work has appeared in many journals and anthologies
including Dreaming Awake: New Contemporary Prose Poetry from the United States, Australia, and the United Kingdom. She is a PhD candidate at the Centre for
Place Writing in Manchester, looking at kinship with disappearing
post-industrial architecture. She has 6 poetry collections and 4 above/ground press chapbooks, and has two new poetry collections coming out in 2026, Stay
Awhile (April, Knives Forks and Spoons Press) and This Now Extends to My
Daughter (May, Blue Diode Press).
Lydia Unsworth lectures in Ottawa at The Factory Lecture Series and reads via “VERSeFest presents” on Sunday, March 29, 2026 as part of VERSeFest 2026.
rob mclennan: You’ve two new titles
out this spring—Stay Awhile and This Now Extends to My Daughter—how
do you see these titles in terms of your overall trajectory?
Lydia Unsworth: Firstly, these two books
were written in parallel, in one great sprawling document, so I’m really
pleased they are coming out at the same time. I kind of see them as siblings.
They are the first books I received any kind of funding to help me write, which
was fantastic as I was out of work for a little while and this great sprawling
document written late at night was how I was processing everything and making a
game of it. Anyway, due to the funding, I was able to pay for editing and
worked with Fran Lock on them. I wrote into the poems for a long time and
essentially cleaved the document in two. I think I was angrier writing these
two books than I have been during the writing of any of my previous books,
which I suppose is part of growing up and understanding the larger systems
behind everything and the traps they keep us in. But I was also funnier,
and less scared of hiding the ignorance and honesty in my voice, and that shift
came through repeated performing. I started performing more regularly
after 2022, so after I’d finished writing Arthropod (Death of Workers
Whilst Building Skyscrapers), which was written during the pandemic largely and
in the Netherlands. There’s a poem in my above/ground pamphlet, Gag,
called “Montage”, and I read that at Tom Branfoot’s More Song poetry
night in Bradford, UK, and people were laughing, and that experience kind of
changed the way I wrote. I found I only wanted to read the funny ones, and so I
had to write more of them. I also realised that I could write exactly what
happened in a way, and the poetry was in the filter of the noticing, all the
stored-up connections, and in the placements of the little punchlines among the
seriousness. So basically, to answer the question, I think these two books are
just my voice, without anymore the trying to find or hide it, and they are
written with performance in mind.
rm: Is an attention to
performance how you usually approach composition? How does the text on the page
translate to performance, and is that something you hope the reader might
garner from their own reading?
LU: I think attention to how
it sounds out loud is how I approach composition, or rhythm, or where I
put it on the page. And I suppose humour underlies everything I do. Like, if it
amuses me, then it must work on some level. I don’t know if that’s the same as
performance, but it’s definitely vocal now, my rhythm, and I don’t know how
that comes across on the page, or in another person’s inner voice, but I try to
make the spacing tell the reader where to pause. And I write a lot of prose
poetry, as you know, which is supposed to be intense and frantic and fast to me.
I remember seeing “Not I” by Samuel Beckett at the theatre in Salford
once, and I think those 7 minutes of a disembodied red-lipsticked mouth
screaming at me in a crowd in the dark was one of the greatest things that
has ever happened to me. A friend did say at my last reading that she thinks my
poems are made for the performing of them, and that was interesting, that this
feeling I had about the change could indeed be sensed by another. But saying
all this, there isn’t any really performative element to the way I read, it’s
the dead-pan under performance of it, the sort of resilient cheeky
resignation of the voice somehow, I dunno. It’s like I hold the emotions inside
a certain dry irreverence to stop it all getting out of hand.
rm: I’m curious where this
approach to the prose poem as “intense and frantic and fast” emerged.
LU: I think that’s just how
my brain thinks. I started writing in a very automatic way, during my art
degree, just typing as fast as I could, and I love the surprise of it, the way
the brain associates, almost bypassing consciousness, or at least reflection,
and sometimes the connections feel a little bit like magic, like everything is just
hanging around in there waiting to be used, both very new stuff, the ephemera
of the day, for example, or phrases from a film or song, mixed up with really
old, imprinted stuff from way back. And then the editing carves into that,
shapes it. I like maintaining the rectangle of thought, and the speed of the
capture. I suppose in that way it reminds me of photography, in that it’s near
instant and sort of the same shape, as opposed to a carefully planned-out
painting composition.
I’m not saying all prose poetry works like this, but
the writing I like tends to make me want to read faster and faster and sort of
fill myself with the all-over-the-consciousness energy of it. Like a thought
roller coaster.
rm: Honestly, I think this
fits in with your approach to the placement of your poems on the page as
notational, as you suggest; how lines appear on the page. Do you see your
poems, then, as equally comfortable on the page as they are being performed?
LU: Yes, I see them as the
same these days. Of course I don’t know how it is to be somebody else, but
the way I perform them is exactly how they are to me as I write them. There’s a
little more adrenaline in the performance, and a little more confidence on
the page, perhaps, but it’s a minor detail.
rm: I’m intrigued at the
idea of these two works composed in parallel, paired in a single expanded
compositional document. Is this a structure you’ve worked prior to these
collections? What prompted them into two separate titles as opposed to
something singular, made up of parts?
LU: I think it was the
editing process with Fran that helped me separate them. As I said, I was out of
work for a time, and I was taking a train every week to a sort of overlooked
middle-sized town nearby Manchester to complete a job application in a café and
go look for the most exciting concrete building I’d seen in that place on the
internet, to kind of try to gamify the mundanity of the process. I didn’t like
the way I was free (from work) but also trapped (by parenting and by the job
centre’s ludicrous demands that you’re supposed to apply for 30 jobs a week and
spend 8 hours a day 5 days a week doing so, as if that’s any indication of
quality) by circumstance, so I was trying to find a way to bend the situation
into something that felt more creative, and justify going for a walk basically.
So the document started there, documenting all these places and buildings and
my moving through them (I was recently back to the UK after 7 years away and was
terribly homesick) as a distraction from the larger structure stuff I had going
on in my life at the time. Anyway, the structural stuff was of course creeping
into the poems – the job centre, the admin, the insomnia, relationships, things
the kids needed (like housing!) – but I just kept going, writing it all down,
usually very late at night. Then at some point I had nearly 300 pages of it.
Usually way before that point I sort of stop and assess what’s happening in the
document and break it up and chuck bits out (so yes, I do often start with just
one document), but I didn’t have any headspace for that. And that’s right
around the time the arts funding came in and I found something part-time to
tide me over until I figured out what to do next and a lot of the pressure
released. Then I realised there were two very different collections here, and
also that one of the reasons I hadn’t stopped was that I had a lot more to say
about the kind of post-industrial, underfunded environments I had moved back
to, but that’s another story.
rm: Do you see your work as
responses to environment? How do your poems begin?
LU: Yes, definitely. I also
spend a lot of time at the moment travelling to specific environments precisely
in order to respond to them. A lot of my work currently is working in this way.
I like the rich yet almost boring details of the (predominantly urban)
environment, and how by attending to such details you raise their status,
change their nature. I love the accidental juxtapositions in the landscape, in
shop windows, in car parks, or just passing by. The same street can provoke a
different poem every time I pass it, and I actually have a lot of recent prose
poetry sort of hyper-focused on the details of the school run. I love walking
with other people too, as fragments of the conversations we have flow together through
the landscape’s own poetry and my personal memories and associations when I
later come to write it up. And that blend, also mixed with focused reading –
like knowing what I want to fill my consciousness up with and why before I
start writing – does a lot of the work for me it seems.
Saying that, my early drafts too often begin with “I
was walking ..” or “On the bus yesterday ...” and I do often have to chop the
first bit away in the editing process.
rm: I’m curious about the
way you shape manuscripts, as you sound very much as someone who writes books,
as opposed to individual, stand-alone poems. Have you a shape or a subject
matter or a sense of form or tone in mind when attempting to begin a project,
or is the process more organic?
LU: I do write books at the
moment, I think, and I noticed that myself only recently. Perhaps that’s the
freedom of having the time while I’m doing a PhD. I think I was writing
out of a sense of desperation or “needing to catch up” for a long time there,
as I didn’t really have the confidence to know how to even begin for
about a decade, despite sort of being sure this was the only thing I
really wanted. My first baby was born just before my first book was
published and I remember writing that very intensely while pregnant, with what
was in a way the deadline expanding inside me. Happily, I think the kids just
meant I didn’t have enough time to worry about failing anymore; I could write
first, and have anxiety later, that was the thinking. Anyway, that’s besides
the point. I think now, since the experience of splicing this document in two,
I think maybe, at least currently, I am working in a much more project-based
way. Though, saying that, there is also a sprawling document running alongside
those projects, which is accumulating mass in a more organic fashion. It’s
actually already very long – but, to quote NOFX, the desperation’s gone. Or, it’s
changed, in any case.
rob mclennan is the author of nearly
fifty published books of poetry, fiction and non-fiction, the latest of which
is the book of sentences (University of Calgary Press, 2025), listed recently by the CBC in their “Best Canadian Poetry Books of 2025.” A
further title, edgeless, a suite of long poems, will be out this spring
with Catlin Press. His above/ground press, which now has a clever substack, will be thirty-three years old in July. He is the current Artistic Director of
VERSeFest: Ottawa's International Poetry Festival, which holds its 16th annual
festival from March 24-29, 2026.
