Congratulations to Molly Twomey on being selected as the Southword Debut Poetry Collection winner for 2023 for Raised Among Vultures.
In Molly Twomey’s spectacular, and frequently disturbing, debut seemingly nonchalant expressions of hard experience (‘Over coffee I tell you I slept with some guy’) meld with vivid imaginings. Excited hearts are ‘bumper cars’, a Coke is ‘a huge cup of starless sky’ and a radish is ‘a red grenade’. In this world of Tumblr, online group therapy, NA and Touch ID, Molly Twomey’s unflinching art chronicles a history of eating disorders and inner conflicts. These are frontline reports from the outposts of youth, ‘nights / spent drunk with boys we could barely remember, / would never forget.’ But Raised Among Vultures, while venturing that ‘It’s impossible to live without breaking someone’, is also a book about longing and lessons — ‘It took so long to learn that I won’t die / if I sleep in.’ In her first collection Molly Twomey breathes new life into Irish poetry.
Molly Twomey grew up in Lismore, County Waterford, and graduated in 2019 with an MA in Creative Writing from University College Cork. She works as a Marketing and Development Officer for Graffiti Theatre, Cork. She has been published in Poetry Ireland Review, Banshee, The Irish Times, Mslexia and The Stinging Fly and has been chosen for Poetry Ireland’s Introductions series. She was recently awarded an Arts Council Literature Bursary.
