Released 31st October, 2025 // 56 pages // 978-1-917617-39-0 // RRP: £9.99 / $13.99 / €11.99
Kinder Parasites by Holly Moberley is a maximalist and genre-slipping debut that hijacks contemporary idioms, internet detritus, and pop-cultural flotsam to stage a queer, hyper-literate theatre of identity and desire. Operating in a voice both restless and radically knowing, the collection riffs through histories, mythologies, and social absurdities with wit, surrealist flare, and emotional precision. Beneath the meme-rich surface lies a persistent, searching tenderness, and an insistence on connection, lineage and survival in an age of spectacle, loss, and transformation. These poems dazzle with range and density, embracing mess as a mode of resistance and reinvention.
PRAISE for Kinder Parasites:
Moberley's writing is delicious, oozing with pleasure at every step. These are tender, enticing poems - instructions on how to live.
— Chloe Elliot
These exclamatory poems parse the queer panic of your 20s with urgency and wit. 'Welcome to not-girl summer,' writes Moberley, 'make yourself at home.'
— Helen Bowell
Kinder Parasites is a brilliant and buzzing debut. Moberley catapults from Katy Perry in space to Caroline Calloway in a therapist's office, the glittering beacons of girlboss feminism becoming spectres in a collection that balances humour and pathos as it splits apart any expectation of what's coming next. Kinder Parasites simmers with irreverence as Moberley teases us through the disappointments and elations of being a person in the world; it is endlessly fun and always surprising.
— Ciara Maguire
Explosive in its refusal to conform, bold in its language and beautiful in its embrace of the grotesque. There's an exhilarating rebelliousness in how this clear-eyed debut pamphlet whiplashes us from pop and internet culture to literary reference to body horror and back. This is an unapologetic joy ride of poems by Holly Moberley. In Kinder Parasites, exclamation marks become totems, pages become playgrounds for structural invention, and poetry is a vessel that excavates what it means to be a queer woman making sense of herself in a world pulling her in every direction. Every page turn holds a surprise. Once read, these poems will live in your body forever.
— Malaika Kegode
ABOUT Holly Moberley:
Holly Moberley (she/they) is a queer poet and poison berry from the South East. She is a Poetry Society Young Critic and has been published in fourteen poems, Bi+Lines, Butcher’s Dog, & The North. She is Bristol’s 2021 LYRA Slam Champion and is currently touring a spoken word show on CPR and the drowning girl motif.
