Isdal Av Susannah Dickey

<p><b>Winner of the PEN Heaney Prize<br>Shortlisted for the John Pollard Foundation International Poetry Prize<br>A <i>Guardian </i>and <i>Irish Times Book </i>of 2023</b><br><br><b>The much-anticipated debut poetry collection from acclaimed novelist Susannah Dickey, on the subject of our cultural obsession with true crime.</b><br><br><i>ISDAL</i> is a timely interrogation of the true crime genre. In the first of its three parts, we follow the flirty co-presenters of a podcast about the mystery of ''Isdal Woman'', whose burnt remains were discovered in Norway in 1970 and who has never been identified.<br><br>At the centre of the book is an inquiry into our perennial obsession with female victims, sexiness, and death: ‘The death in question has already occurred’, the poet observes, ‘has occurred to someone sufficiently abstract as to allow us to romp gainfully, guilelessly, guiltlessly through a simulacrum of death’s corridors’.<br><br>The free verse poems in the final section both explore and – perhaps inevitably – enact the ethical ambiguities of the genre. Witty, excoriating, formally ingenious, <i>ISDAL </i>marks the arrival of a thrilling talent in contemporary poetry.</p>