Sunday at the Skin Launderette

Shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection, and longlisted for the Guardian First Book Award 2008.

Quietly persuasive and formally adept, the poems in Kathryn Simmonds'' first collection engage with both the quotidian and the transcendental. Often in urban or suburban settings, her protagonists struggle with mundane tasks such as cooking or commuting or office work - all of the obstacles of modernity - and then, by some shift of attention, or by some keen narrowing of focus, they chance upon the surreal or the spiritual.

This is a poetry of subtle contexts and allusions, as much as concerned with the vulnerability of the body as for the fate of the soul and the idea of ''keeping faith'' in God and life.

"An expansive imagination, a wide formal range, wit and humanity - Sunday at the Skin Laundrette is a remarkable debut."
Michael Symmons Roberts

"Quirky, witty, moving Kathryn Simmonds'' gift is to find joy and beauty in unexpected places. She invests the everyday world with an extraordinary luminosity."
Jackie Kay

"This playful and knowing first collection is fuelled throughout by a strong sense of lyricism... The collection is made up of such balancing acts, of gentle glimpses into the pitfalls and seeming treacheries of the everyday"
Charles Bainbridge, The Guardian

Kathryn Simmonds was born in Hertfordshire in 1972, she has an MA in writing from the University of East Anglia. She currently lives in London. Kathryn received an Eric Gregory Award in 2002 and her pamphlet Snug, was published in 2004. Her poems have appeared widely in magazines and she was winner of the 2006 Poetry London Competition and the 2007 Wigtown Poetry Competition.