Please join me in congratulating Jen Feroze on the launch of her debut poetry collection Tiny Bright Thorns published by Nine Pens Publishing.
Jen Feroze’s debut pamphlet ‘Tiny Bright Thorns’ charts the magic and madness of early motherhood. Shot through with sea and sky, wonder and terror, these unflinching poems explore themes of love, doubt, growth, loneliness and the sudden shift of identity that comes with the birth of a child.
Tiny Bright Thorns begins rooted in the domestic, but slinks out among forests of foxes, flames a triumphant sunrise on a beach, has an argument with a Salvador Dali painting and finds whales swimming among the stars.
“Tiny Bright Thorns is a love-song to the tender, fierce and ‘tar-thick’ days and nights of early motherhood, the ‘feathered cries of the new’. Rich in startling imagery, open-hearted and often movingly truthful, these poems shine – a ‘beacon’ passed from ‘mother to mother to mother’. How I wish I had read them as a new mother myself navigating those perilous, unmoored early weeks. Jen Feroze writes with grace and humanity of the ‘herbaceous bite/ of exquisite and terrifying love’ in all its forms and the power of imagination to connect us all.” – Sarah Westcott.
About Jen Feroze
Jen Feroze lives by the sea in Essex. A former Foyle Young Poet, her work has appeared in publications including Under the Radar, Poetry Wales, Magma, iamb, Butcher’s Dog, Berlin Lit, And Other Poems, Okay Donkey and The Interpreter’s House. She has edited anthologies for Black Bough Poetry and The Mum Poem Press, and she was a winner of the 2022/2023 Magma Editors’ Prize. Find her on X @jenlareine and on instagram @the_colourofhope.
Patricia M Osborne 