The Girl Who Forgets How To Walk

In this remarkable first collection, tarns, limekilns and abandoned pits become portals into a dark, interior world. A woman levitates above a building site; earth slips and fault-lines open up beneath the town; the sea hides ‘a gob of virus’. The moving title sequence tells the story of a young girl with polio who struggles to find her feet — and her voice — in an unforgiving landscape where ‘the ground cannot be trusted’. Alive to geology, memory and myth, The Girl Who Forgets How to Walk is a brave, uncompromising and unmissable debut. Read in! Kate Davis is a poet and storyteller. She was born in 1951 on the Furness peninsula of south Cumbria and has always lived there. Her poems have been published in Iota and Butcher’s Dog, implanted in audio-benches, sung throughout a 12-hour tide cycle, embroidered on clothes, remixed by a sound artist and printed on shopping bags. In 2013 she received a Northern Writers’ Award, New Poets Bursary.