After You Were, I Am

<p>LONGLISTED FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD<br><b><br>This extraordinary debut heralds the arrival of a major new talent.</b><br><br>In <i>After You Were, I Am</i>, charged moments from history collide with our own godless modern world. The book’s three sections – ingenious rewritings of canonical prayers, dramatic monologues from the Pendle witch trials of 1612, and the divine tragedy of the Elizabethan magus John Dee – obsess over individual human characters and how our past informs (and informs on) our present. Ralphs’s style is utterly distinctive; she is a modern metaphysical, tapping into a haunting, era-spanning utterance enlivened by the electric pulse of wordplay and imaginative conceit. This is poetry that in comprehending the past manages to make of it something utterly original and contemporary.<br><br>‘Historical figures inspired two distinctive debuts: Elizabeth I’s court magician John Dee is ventriloquised with dizzying wordplay in Camille Ralphs’s metaphysical After You Were, I Am (Faber, £10.99)’ <i>Telegraph</i>, Best Poetry of 2024 <br><br>‘Ralphs’s mischievous, metaphysical debut riffs on great religious poets, revisits the victims of the Pendle Witch Trials and explores the life of Elizabethan conjuror John Dee. TFS’ <i>Telegraph</i>, ‘The 50 Best Books of 2024 - ranked’</p>