Raised Among Vultures won the 2023 Southword Debut Collection Poetry Award and was shortlisted for the Seamus Heaney Poetry Prize for First Collection and the Farmgate Café National Poetry Award.

Look, if we are going to do this,
know that I was raised among vultures.
— ‘Don’t pick me tulips’

Such bold injunctions announce a formidable new talent. In Raised Among Vultures, 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.

'Twomey’s high-wire couplet and triplet stanzas are pared down to the essentials, heirlooms beginning like an Emily Dickinson echo, ‘My dietician says if I don’t eat / my oestrogen won’t restore. / My body will always be a door // lock on its hinges, / safe-guarding its room / of dust and secrets.’ // but the wick twist is Twomey’s own, as she wonders if the dietician’s child is ‘heavy enough that she could use him / as a kettlebell for Russian twists?’ Like Hodgson, Twomey has a strong sense of two selves — ‘but isn’t starving yourself / the most brutal thing? The slow collapse / of bones, sprained ankles to sunken cheeks, / the last segment of voice / burrowing into muffled quiet.’ (The Most Brutal Thing).
  This sense of two selves is  mirrored in relationships and Twomey’s frequent use of the second person point of view. Twomey is a gifted storyteller, her recovery narrative spiked with keen insight and dark humour as she cautiously observes her ambushing self' — Martina Evans, The Irish Times

'. . . a poet for a new Ireland, for a new post-Covid world' — Thomas McCarthy