In Kiss Chase with Darwin, Nina Parmenter tracks the long evolutionary line from fish to woman, moving between deep time and the supermarket aisle. Parmenter writes with surreal comic invention, letting Mother Earth, Charles Darwin, Vincent van Gogh, and Vladimir Putin loose among poems on motherhood, shame, capitalism, and the indignities of being looked at. Presiding over the collection is a small-brained primate poised at the threshold of speech, unaware of broadband deals, antidepressants, and the ten brands of packed ham awaiting her. 

PRAISE for Kiss Chase with Darwin:

If you’ve ever wondered what it would feel like to be taken by the hand and pulled helter-skelter through a hall of mirrors version of evolution, then Nina Parmenter has the answer. In poems that quirk in a perpetual half smile, she explores what it means and, crucially, how it feels to be human in an increasingly perplexing and enraging age. Prepare to feel seen and sometimes exposed, to be righteously angry and gorgeously small — this book will leave you seeing stars.

   — Jen Feroze

Have you ever watched the end of polite society play out in your local supermarket? Do your ideas literally have a life of their own? Are you jealous of the incomprehensible variety of life on Earth and long for the days when everything was less black and white and distinctly more surreal? If your answer to any of these questions is fish, then this delightful collection is absolutely for you. In Kiss Chase with Darwin, a razor sharp poet focuses her personal imagistic microscope on the minutiae of the evolutionary process: nothing on our planet (and beyond) is safe from deconstruction, redefinition or recreation. Nina Parmenter is a mistress of the poetic arts, and once she shows you the truth behind the normality of existence, it is impossible to unsee these perfect, precise reframings of reality. You will never look at packet ham in the same way again.

   — S Reeson

Kiss Chase with Darwin by Nina Parmenter is an intelligent and fascinating pamphlet. Poems on evolution, (Mother Earth, DNA, oxygen and stars) collide with others on the many ills of the so-called evolved world (social media, capitalism, our obsession with the superficial). More personal subjects such as the trials of communication, relationships, and womanhood are addressed with sensitivity. At the heart of the collection is the poet’s sense of guilt that she has somehow contributed to the world’s imperfections and evolutionary crises: please/let me talk about shame/how huge it is/why it doesn’t fit through my lips. She apologises to her children: I’m sorry I made you here, now/just as the upward curve/is crashing into the sky. Parmenter’s trademark use of surreal imagery, poetic form, dark humour and a stellar cast (Van Gogh, Putin, Bublé), is both deft and insightful. At one point, ‘the verbal’ becomes so difficult that the poet picks up her pen to write instead. We are fortunate she did: Kiss Chase with Darwin is the result of a struggle and a questioning that are both pertinent and timely.

   — Sarah Hemings

ABOUT Kiss Chase with Darwin:

Nina Parmenter is a working mum of two teenage boys. Her poetic obsessions include science fiction, nature, the feminine and the surreal. She has been published in Magma, The North, Obsessed with Pipework, Ink, Sweat and Tears, Raceme and numerous other journals. She runs the Trowbridge Stanza of the Poetry Society, where she facilitates workshops, presents guest readers and hosts open mics. Her first collection, Split, Twist, Apocalypse was published in 2022.