Significant Wow

Following her Laureate Choice Pamphlet The Day of the Flying Ants, Emily Cotterill’s debut collection Significant Wow is delivered with dry wit, fizzing with humour and inventiveness. Her subjects range from celebrity culture (Blondie, David Bowie, Michael Sheen) to the class system (“Money in your mouth like an accident”) to reservations about parenthood in ‘A Speculative Script for Motherhood’. Here is a surreal mixture of feral hogs, terrariums, the YouTube trend: GRWM (Get Ready With Me), and James Dean Bradfield shopping in Tesco. Inhabiting urban, post-industrial spaces, Cotterill is a millennial voice laced with neo-punk spikiness.