Furniture, Lorraine Mariner's debut collection, was shortlisted for both the Forward Prize for Best First Collection and the Seamus Heaney Centre Poetry Prize. Her poetry is sharp, quirky and skilful.

Praise for Furniture:

'Pleasingly direct and conversational, almost aggressively anti-poetic. The poems are spoken in the voice of a young woman who inches her way through a blizzard of bewilderment at life's unpredictable twists and turns'

Tablet

Furniture introduced one of the sharpest and most distinctive new voices to have emerged in English poetry for years, with readers delighted by Lorraine Mariner's gift for combining straight talk and sidelong looks with penetrating psychological insight. Although There Will Be No More Nonsense sees a considerable broadening of Mariner's range, they will be relieved to find her voice as recognizable as ever; however, this is work of terrific variety. There are sly takes on the everyday surrealism of social media, and a series of highly personal (and extremely funny) Holy Virtues and Deadly Sins; there are several of Mariner's trademark dramatic monologues, with the poet adopting the personae of an eighteenth-century housemaid, a tollbooth attendant . . . and a mermaid. Mariner's many voices are acts not of empty ventriloquism, but of great imaginative empathy - unlocking in the lives of others the very secret thoughts that seem to connect with our own.