Released August 31st, 2025 // 66 pages // 978-1-917617-23-9 // RRP: £12.99 / $17.99 / €15.99
Lucy Hurst’s Gut Feeling is a fiercely intelligent and formally dynamic collection that interrogates illness, vulnerability, and survival through a visceral, unflinching poetics. Writing from the embodied experience of chronic illness, Hurst dismantles medical and emotional discourse with sharp lyric clarity and experimental control. The poems move between clinical spaces and intimate interiors, balancing detachment and affect, irony and sincerity. What emerges is a poetics of persistence that resists metaphor and easy resolution, asserting complexity in the face of reductive narratives. This is a work of deep acuity—disruptive, grounded, and bracingly alive.
PRAISE for Gut Feeling:
Gut Feeling is a book of innovative, tender poems that traverses the complicated, always changing landscape of chronic illness. In vivid, blade-sharp language, these poems rail against the fallacy of the 'good patient,' and the ignorance of those who don't want to confront the inherent fragility of physical life and the fleshly vicissitudes of the body. Hurst is a startling, original and thrilling new voice.
— Rebecca Tamás
Hurst writes that ‘some of us / are left at the fringe of language’. These poems make of that fringe a frontier, writing illness and intimacy in startling new ways. This what it feels like, at the shifting boundary between human and world: deadpan and afraid, vigilant and playful, ‘forgivably small’. This is a brilliant debut.
— Caleb Klaces
An intimate and astonishing debut which asks us to pay close attention to what it really means to be alive. Hurst is both unflinching and tender in her exploration of sickness, love and friendship in the wake of COVID-19.
— Charlotte Shevchenko Knight
ABOUT Lucy Hurst:
Lucy Hurst is a poet and writer, with a PhD in creative writing from York St John University. Her work often discusses chronic illness and disability through experimental forms. Her first pamphlet, Modern Medicine, was published by Fly on the Wall in 2021, and its title poem was shortlisted for the 2020 Bridport Prize.
