Decade

Decade by Anna Jordan is a fierce, intimate debut that refuses the neat arcs of recovery and instead writes grief as lived time, full of bodily recoil, dark humour, and sudden tenderness. These poems move through miscarriage and maternal loss, depression, separation, and the daily negotiations of parenthood, set against recognisable rooms and public spaces, from a Premier Inn in Clacton to the kitchen where love, addiction, and survival are repeatedly remade. Jordan's style is direct and theatrically alert, capable of lyric lift and brutal undercut, and her best poems hold despair and comedy in the same breath, letting the sacred and the profane share a line without softening either. What emerges is a book of unsentimental devotion, where language becomes both witness and coping mechanism, and where the ordinary is charged with the full voltage of grief.