Sunday at the Skin Launderette

This is the first full collection of poems by Kathryn Simmonds. Her's is a fresh, lovely, accessible voice. She confronts the dilemmas of a young woman living in the city with considerable humour and a poignant grace. An element of surrealism often invades her poems, taking from the quotidian to the suddenly unsettling and strange, as when a secretary flies up into space, or a laundrette becomes a place for stripping off skin. She also approaches her themes and characters with an ironic tenderness, as in 'Snug' where world leaders mentioned in the news on a bedside radio are invited to share a nap with the speaker, thereby encouraging world peace. Particularly notable is the way she transforms the mundane, the "lull of 3 o'clock", so that days spent in dull jobs, on the bus, at the photocopier, suddenly become moments of expectation and beauty. In her poems, there is sense that anything might happen - and probably will.