Poacher
Reading Poacher is like wandering into a mysterious glade. The poems are the forest’s opening, each one of them taking up space in strange and unsettling ways. You can expect the poems in Lenni Sanders’s debut pamphlet to unfurl their exquisite details and seduce you into lingering in their world.
As we venture through Poacher, we see hands everywhere. Whether they are “inquisitive hands” (‘Happily, we go under’) or “careful hands” (‘Anteater kid’), Sanders’s focus on the manual is symptomatic of their sensitivity to how things feel. Indeed, the characters in the poems itch, quiver, fizz and throb. Perhaps equally rife are tongues, which lick, throttle and stopper in all kinds of mesmerising ways. The poem, ‘Anteater kid’, is a long, intimate exploration of how a tongue can choose to “recede” and “coil” rather than surrender its words.
For all of its gothic punch, Sanders has weaved a wealth of fragility into this pamphlet. We see through “hot silk” (‘Sheanimal’), “crushed grey satin” (‘The sickest platitude’) and take our seat in a “candled restaurant” (‘Anteater kid’). There are tender and complex moments between bodies and insightful mockery of society’s ideas about bodies, and both co-exist within this book’s small universe.
It might take a moment to let yourself be wooed through the ferns of Poacher – beguiling it might at first seem – but it is well worth continuing the venture. Deer-like, we “stoop to drink”, as in the final poem ‘Dumbstruck, the king’. These poems call us back to drink more and more, though it's hard to put your finger on quite what it is that gives them their potent and intoxicating charm.
Poacher is published by The Emma Press