Molly Twomey’s first collection, Raised Among Vultures, touched readers and listeners in uncommon ways. Reviewing it in Poetry Ireland’s Trumpet Annie Brown wrote that it ‘feels like a friend’. Chic to be Sad continues a young woman’s report from the front lines of experience. These fearless poems, rich in simile (a smile ‘wide / as a long weekend’) and striking detail, rest in ordinary settings — an ‘Online Staff Meeting’, an Aldi car park in Youghal.
Framed between work that centres on a fire in her family home this book displays an even wider range than her debut — from ‘My Brother’s Friends Draw Dicks’, ‘The Mechanic Speaks to My Boyfriend Over My Head’ and ‘Why We Don’t Have Kids’ it reaches to the Guggenheim Museum in Venice and considerations of art. There’s a constant sense of the aftermath of illness and the poems never shy from physical and emotional vulnerability. Brave in its honesty and directness, Chic to be Sad confirms a special gift and presence in Irish poetry before reaching its wise conclusion: ‘There is so much to know, / so much I want you to hear.’
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Reviews
Excerpt from Plume Poetry review by Heather Treseler:
. . . ‘Twomey’s first book, also published by the prestigious Gallery Press, vaulted her to the forefront of poetry in Ireland three years ago: Raised Among Vultures was shortlisted for the Seamus Heaney Prize for Best First Collection, and it won the Southword Debut Collection Poetry Award. When a poet skips the queue, writing a first collection that garners regional or national acclaim, there is tremendous pressure as she composes the next volume. But Twomey shows that such expectation can be lightly born and duly answered: Chic To Be Sad marks an expansion of her powers and continuing proof of her promise, all while working the furrows of her previous accomplishment, the significant ground broken in her first book. . .
As a generation of women in Ireland and in the U.S. comes of age in the wake of MeToo—and the ultra-conservative backlash with its tradwives, attacks on birth control and reproductive choice, and “MRS degree” rhetoric—we need poets willing to write, as Eavan Boland, Michael Longley, Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill, and Seamus Heaney were, into the fray of politics and history as well as into the hope and suffering of contemporary life. Twomey, and her growing international readership, should take heart in the delivery of this splendid collection in all its rich rewards and look forward to the broadening compass of her art.
— Heather Treseler, Plume Poetry
Book Information
Publication date: 17 July 2025
Details: 72pp
ISBN PBK: 978 1 91737 104 9
ISBN HBK: 978 1 91737 105 6
Cover: ‘Just So You Know I Was Thinking Of You’ by Niamh Swanton
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