Sarah Thelwall

Book of Hare is a feral, myth-charged poetry collection in which the boundary between woman and animal collapses. Across these poems, a shape-shifting figure (at once hare and woman) runs through blood sport, domestic violence, ecological devastation, and the long persecution of witches, carrying the marks of what has been hunted, silenced, and named expendable. Drawing on folklore, ritual, and contemporary crisis, the collection reimagines the hare as scapegoat, trickster, goddess, and witness.
Language fractures, loops, and inverts; poems enact pursuit, commodification, and erasure on the page, while also reclaiming poetry as a bodily, pre-lingual force, a chant, a vent, and a spell. Words are eaten, broken, regrown; alphabets strain under the pressure of climate collapse and inherited trauma. Classical and folk figures - Eileithyia, Hecate, the witch, the corn spirit - appear alongside modern machinery, financial systems, and poisoned landscapes, binding ancient myth to present catastrophe.
Violence is never abstract: it is intimate, ecological, and historical, inscribed on female and animal bodies alike. Unsettling, incantatory, and formally daring, Book of Hare is a work of survival and transformation - poetry that refuses silence, and keeps running.