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JENNIFER HORGAN was awarded a mentorship with Thomas McCarthy in 2023 through the Munster Literature Centre. She was shortlisted in the Yeats Thoor Ballylee Poetry Prize in 2023. In November 2024 she read as part of O’Bhéal’s International Winter Warmer poetry festival. A secondary English teacher by profession, Jennifer wrote for some years as The Irish Examiner’s Secret Teacher. In 2021, she released her non-fiction book O Captain My Captain: One Teacher’s Hope for Change in the Irish Education System, with Orpen Press. She has written on education for The Irish Times and The Guardian also. A regular contributor to local and national radio, she also writes local features for the Echo and a weekly column for The Irish Examiner.
Jennifer Horgan has created an artful collection of astonishing attachments and emotional grace notes
— Thomas McCarthy
We write it — and our words make flesh.
Our scarred, wet, trembling hair on bone
is birthed. Months, we’ve been left curled in the dark
like frigid rope, unfurl. We roar our breasts,
sore and heavy with milk, our stained mattresses,
our mess. We bleed through vowels, our hands
pawing nouns like inflamed gum; we paste skin
across bare rhythm. We sway lines like hips, blaze
our shapes in libraries and bookshops. Recite
poems about labia and HRT. We, who are made
of surfaces to be broken, scream our bodies
out in assonance. Scream, until we are trapped
inside these shells again, no longer trapped
in beds, kitchens, in laundries, in prisons,
not in asylums, or in convents, but in our own
poetry. Thinly sliced again, while men
sit and watch from the dry aisles of intellect,
nodding, blind to their ceaseless spill.
without moss, sage lichen blotches;
these iron gates unstained by winter gales,
algae, pigeon droppings.
Imagine this street born yesterday,
a Georgian terrace looking new.
Imagine rifling through to the beginning,
through a bonfire of thigh masters,
broken lamps, ghetto blasters, raver jeans, rusted trikes,
encyclopaedias, deep fat friers, holy medals, inscribed, sepia photographs,
epitaphs, leather bags, re-heeled shoes, stitched letters on linen,
pressed handkerchiefs, manuscripts, figurines,
cracked brown bottles, magazines.
Same, the taste of boiled vegetables from plates.
Same, the smell of dogs’ coats after rain, the generous
petals on even the lowest hanging peonies.
Imagine this street, where you stand, rock yourself as in a cot —
between the bleached white linen, digital clock.
PRE-ORDER
ISBN: 978-1-915877-03-1 | Pages: 80 | Year published: 2025 | Hardback
Care is the debut collection by Cork-based poet Jennifer Horgan. Through her work born of personal experience and characterised by arresting imagery, Horgan calls on us to reconcile and to unite—to care. This is a hopeful collection, intent on championing the goodness in people, deftly highlighting our propensity towards kindness and away from hate. Care is a hand stretched across whatever it is that divides us, extended with a delicacy of spirit and unwavering hope.
Delivery starts from April 22nd
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Doire is the Irish word for oak grove, translating into English as Derry.