Speculative Frequencies

“the companies of crows and bats pass troubled by daylight hours, postures, and social relations this is a commotion - I see a outline” In this invigorating new collection, Briony Hughes uses her experiences tracking bats through the Surrey Hills as a means to expand ‘communication’ beyond the human body. The bat as a cultural figure is small, blind, nocturnal, and occasionally sinister, but in Hughes’ poems they become a medium through which to interrogate the most pressing issues of our time; what happens when we abandon concepts of human exceptionalism and see ourselves as animals existing with other animals within an ecosystem? In a book of innovative engagements with language and visuality, Hughes explores the enmeshment of humanity within the natural world, and finds a moving kinship with these exceptional, easily overlooked creatures. __________ Briony Hughes is a poet and lecturer at Royal Holloway, University of London, where she leads the Poetry Pathway for the MA in Creative Writing. She has published six books of poetry including June: A Haunting (2024) and Rhizomes (2023), while her monograph on Hydropoetics is forthcoming from Bloomsbury Academic. Her artist’s books have been collected by institutions including the National Poetry Library, Senate House, The Bodleian, and Kings College London Special Collections. She runs Osmosis Press, and co-edits the Resurgence and Ecologist Magazine’s Poetry Feature.