The latest edition to the Harry Baker Bookshop. Maria’s book is so stunning that I didn’t let myself read it until I had finished mine, so that I wouldn’t lose confidence by comparing the two. I have since had the joy of performing alongside Maria multiple times and hearing it in person, and I cannot recommend it enough.

Eloquent and uncompromising, Swell explores the triumphs and hardships of the journey to new motherhood - through pregnancy, miscarriage, birth and beyond In the consultation room I stared at the purple flowers in their purple vase and imagined my insides: an ocean, a cave, a storm. Maria Ferguson's second poetry collection is a raw and powerful documentation of one woman's experience of becoming a mother. Against a backdrop of the sounds and sensations of daily life, she longs for her own mother's embrace, observes as her body changes and charts a course through loss and wilting house plants toward recovery, empowerment and renewal. Tender, direct and winningly witty, Swell distils the poet's complex feelings surrounding family and domesticity, exploring the contending weight and levity felt as she contemplates a thrillingly unfamiliar new chapter. Ferguson is a poet as alert to the absurd as to the shattering, and these are large-hearted poems, full of life and thought. Together, they invite the reader to join them in a search for self-acceptance, for freedom from shame, and for a path to stability in increasingly uncertain times.