137 x 215mm, 86 pages, black and white printing, perfect bound, 2022 

Tessa Berring’s Folded Purse is a rigorous and playful study of the known world and its ultimately unknowable things. Within its folds, poems call to, sometimes quarrel with, each other as images (a warm spell, an outdoor cow) slip from one poem to another. Some of these poems offer miraculously vivid excavations of such everyday objects as the humble scatter cushion, while others ache with the longing to touch, really touch, ‘everything everything everything.’ In a recurring dream of swimming pools, the speaker trembles underwater ‘without a doubt’, but doubt propels the questing energy that fizzes through this work like ‘an incohesion of soap bubbles/ rising through a surface.’ —   Ellen Dillon

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