Thin Slices

Thin Slices is an explosive collection of experiments in poetry, psychology and science. Flitting between lightness and the literary, Caitlin Stobie explores womanhood and the environment through a multitude of tiny worlds.

Set between South Africa and the United Kingdom, each poem acts as a slide containing colourful landscapes and characters. Thin Slices portrays difficult relationships – with ethics, with eating, with reproductive medicine – but cuts through the simple role of victimhood. Rather, these poems ask what it means to relate to others: to guilt inherited from grandmothers, to a blade of jealousy reflected by lovers’ eyes, to violence seen in companion species.

Caitlin Stobie tends to animal, vegetable and mineral forms in these poems that demand careful attention to what we see as both human and natural. In this eagerly-awaited debut, the personal is not just political but ecological, too.

‘Startlingly vivid, tender, and surprising, once I began Thin Slices I couldn’t stop. Caitlin Stobie has written a collection that is at once far-ranging and intimate in both its subject matter and voice. Ecological and bodily in its energy, this book carries us from South Africa to Leeds via oceans and swimming pools and the magnetized view of a membrane. Stobie expertly cuts through public and private spaces and sits us amongst women in hospital waiting rooms and with lovers in a new embrace. Drenched in colour and full of texture and smell, these are poems to be relished and savoured again and again. And yet within this richness Thin Slices takes on difficult and deeply personal subject matter and handles it with sensitivity and grace. Stobie offers an unflinching and precise gaze on everything she examines. Each poem invites us to look and feel on a microscopic level, and to find beauty and revelation in the thin slices of the world that are laid out before us. I love every bit of this remarkable collection.’ – Hannah Copley

‘These are poems of wit and intelligence. Stobie succeeds artfully in navigating between deep personal feeling and sophisticated formal design. The poems call to be enjoyed again and again.’ – Kobus Moolman