These poems are an attempt at recycling. Not in the sense of making sure the right rubbish goes in the right bins, but of recycling the body, and of metamorphosing into something beyond the boundaries of the human. This is something I have always been fascinated by and, if I’m being honest, a little bit terrified of. I remember learning about the lifecycle of butterflies as a child and imagining myself curled in a chrysalis (I should add here that I’ve always had an overactive imagination) waiting to entirely overhaul what I knew about myself as a caterpillar. Does the caterpillar know what it is about to become? Does the caterpillar feel any pain as it becomes the butterfly? This is not something I have ever been able to satisfactorily solve. This type of metamorphosis seems alien, impossible to conceptualise or experientially understand. And yet, each of us is transformed daily. We shed cells, grow new ones, and swallow goodness knows how many microplastics every second. We are ecosystems, worlds on which mites and microbes live, die and reproduce. At what point, then, do we stop defining ourselves as constant individuals? Or even as solely human? My poems grapple with these every day metamorphoses and, in doing so, try to use the sonnet as a chrysalis, of kinds, that transforms its speaker. I use the 14 lines as constraint; as a means of placing the poem under a formal pressure which forces it to boiling point, undergoing a chemical transformation in the process. 

   B Movie is perhaps the more straightforward of the two with regards the type of metamorphoses this formal pressure achieves. It puns on the unintentional linguistic similarity of Hollywood B Movies and bees, and tries to playfully ask what would happen if a lead actress spontaneously transformed into a bee half way through filming. Its title is, then, indebted to Dreamwork’s 2007 Bee Movie, and somewhere Kafka is rolling his eyes in exasperation, but in its silliness B Movie more seriously asks what opportunities of escape from expectations of beauty and success (amongst other things) that transformation into non-human animals offers. 

‍ ‍Clay Pit Engineer, conversely, focuses on the more invisible, everyday metamorphoses we undergo through contact with micro-particulates. It takes its inspiration from a conversation I had with my grandfather about what percentage of the human body is made of china clay. I found the idea naturally concerning as an indicator of accelerated ecological crisis, and yet, I recognised in it, too, a very strange sort of comfort. The idea that we are aggregates of more than just biological matter solved a preemptive fear, I think, that I have about aging, and Clay Pit Engineer tries to make sense of that in language. Every time we brush our teeth we are not only re-acquainted with, but take into our bodies, the lost clay particles of those we love which dissolved into the water and toothpaste we use. We all return to each other again.