Viewings, Alicia Byrne Keane's second collection, works through the many senses of its title: flats seen but not secured in a hostile Dublin rental market, the interior of a body read through scans and symptoms, and the cartography of an island off Galway that was never there. Health anxiety is both subject and method, a habit of scrutiny turned equally on memory, gender, and the limits of what can be verified. Viewings is wry about this vigilance without disowning it, and the attention holds steady through waiting rooms, viewings, and long stretches in which nothing is confirmed. Refusing the consolation of an ending, Alicia Byrne Keane makes the interval a place to live.
 
PRAISE for Viewings:
Precarious and expansive, these are poems of viscerality, of awareness set against the quiet hum of fear.
   — Sheila Armstrong
 
If you're looking for poems that read like where we live: in the material that is also conceptual; in a landscape of interference that is simultaneously here and digitally elsewhere, nothing better than to open Alicia Byrne Keane's collection of vertinginously-sliced fragments of the everyday.
   — Joanna Walsh
 
ABOUT Alicia Byrne Keane:
Alicia Byrne Keane is a Dublin-based poet. Their writing has appeared in The Stinging Fly, Banshee, Poetry Ireland Review, and Oxford Poetry, among other journals. Alicia’s poems have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, Best New Poets Anthology and Best of the Net Anthology. Writing for The Irish Times, Jessica Traynor described Alicia’s debut collection Pretend Cartoon Strength (Broken Sleep Books, December 2023) as a series of ‘meditations within tightly honed forms’, ‘painterly in their detail’.