Invertebrate by E Walker turns its attention toward desire, faith, and the strangeness of embodied life, finding in slugs, scorpions, and cicadas both an unlikely erotics and an unlikelier theology. Guilt arrives early here, in childhood cruelty to snails, and never quite leaves, shading into the anxious theology of a classroom silverfish and the accusatory moths of an insomniac mind, whilst queer desire and identity run through these poems alongside creatures that are hermaphroditic, self-generating, and endlessly transforming. Witty, tender, and unsqueamish, Invertebrate insists that the smallest lives are large enough to hold our appetites, our guilt, and our capacity for change. 
 
PRAISE For Invertebrate:
The epigraph at the beginning of Invertebrate sets us up for a collection of poems about insects.  Indeed much of this collection of extraordinary, and spectacularly visceral poems is rooted in insect behaviour, but it is considerably more than that. These beautifully crafted poems explore the marvellous possibilities of human sexuality in language that owes a great deal to a Catholic upbringing! ‘Pride’ is a perfect example, where cicadas are apparently the centre of the poem but also a metaphor for the celebration of ‘Pride’ – the word taking on its multiple meanings throughout the poem, ending with the glorious ‘gasps of exultation’, only too joyously human and orgasmic. Tenderness and love for all humanity permeate this collection. There is the reality of the sudgrime, the flea, the ubiquitous Christmas song, yet we can find ourselves ‘carried away with blessing’.  This is a collection to read again, and again, each time a deeper layer of meaning will be revealed, another layer of delighted recognition. And we learn a lot about invertebrates!
   — Alicia Stubbersfield
 
These are radical, unruly nature poems, where vulnerable, spineless creatures collide with human fallibility. There’s sex too. Painful, slimy, acrobatic, dangerous sex. Two embracing leopard slugs become ‘the wet lips of themselves’. A male mating praying mantis continues to ‘thrust’ after being decapitated. In Invertebrate, E Walker presides over a circus of the scientifically salacious in a voice at once wise and tender. ‘Top or bottom / Man or woman’ – it matters not one iota in this clandestine world. The collection’s human-centred poems are equally inventive, and artfully sprinkled with religious symbolism: a silverfish in holy water, a centipede scuttling over a prayer book. An illuminating and thrilling read.
   — Ian Humphreys
 
ABOUT E Walker:
E Walker has an MFA in Poetry from MMU, was shortlisted for Primers Volume Five (Nine Arches Press) in 2019 and the Oxford Brookes International Poetry Competition 2020, and won prizes in the International Ambit Poetry Competition in 2021 and Live Canon International Poetry Competition in 2016. They were the 2018 Ilkley Literature Festival Apprentice Poet-in-Residence. Their poems have appeared in anthologies (Independent Variable, Queer Reparative) and magazines such as Magma, The North, In The Red, and Ink, Sweat & Tears. They are currently based in Manchester with Petal, the Chilean Rose tarantula.