Released 31st January, 2023 // 50 pages // 978-1-915079-91-6
Jessica Mookherjee’s Desire Lines is a deeply thrilling joyride into a glamorous/anti-glamorous world of sex, drugs and stolen books. Mookherjee crafts, largely through prose-poetry, a love letter to her golden years in eighties and nineties London. The poetry erupts into choppy river-washed rhythm with tales so urgent and visceral, life simply sings from the pages, wrapped up in gin, leather jackets and cheap nail polish.
PRAISE for Desire Lines:
Desire Lines is a night maraud through the 80s/90s London streets. This is a scary and sultry London where men are out for what they can get and women carry knives in their eyes. A reminder that seediness is never far beneath the glitz. Mookherjee’s London is peopled with characters that are desperate and convincing. This is a collection that is loaded with fresh and exciting language. I was riveted from start to finish. Wow.
― Julia Webb, The Telling
Premised on a fresh chronicling of wandering that puts people at its heart, in corners wrapped in dust and the smell of living, Jessica Mookherjee’s Desire Lines is both a testament and testimony to people, times and places where memorialisation flows in writing. Re-assembling times and their owners in a new order, and with acute alertness to the specific in the lived and the living, Desire Lines ushers in green offshoots into memory to be borne within poetry’s folds as revered difference. In isolation and in relation to one another, the poems tenderly shepherd the spectral and the real into the same space through a multi-textural language that is, from the onset, uncompromisingly autonomous and plural so that the voices, primarily of women, are heard and reimagined in their own right. This extraordinary book recalibrates the reader’s pulses through Mookherjee’s sheer brilliance in capturing what it means, and entails, to return to people and place in writing.
― Yousif M. Qasmiyeh, Writing the Camp
Desire Lines is a tour de force, a kind of love letter to London: energetic, sassy, gritty, addictive, it revels in a profusion of details and geographical locations, in transcendence and in dirt, as it enfolds the Whitmanesque narrator into the city or perhaps writes the city into her body. Authentic, hungry, Mookherjee’s work captures what’s essential and fleeting about London.
― Jemma Borg, Wilder
ABOUT Jessica Mookherjee:
Jessica Mookherjee is the author of three pamphlets and three full collections of poetry. Tigress ( Nine Arches Press) was shortlisted for best second collection in the Ledbury Munthe Prize. She has had poems highly commended in the Forward Prize twice (in 2017 & 2021). She is co-editor of Against the Grain Press.