Growing My Own Gods is a meditation on perception and an accompaniment to reading the night sky. It holds phenomena within its pages and dreams, where each soul is a thread of light in the darkness. The collection opens with Viaggi Sicuri (Safe Travels), and sets in motion an internal and external journey that unfolds throughout. To chart this perpetual passage of time Zoe Bleu sows seeds that sprout sensations of yearning, isolation and hope. The poems are a compass - through deep despair, festering wounds and highest elation they offer guidance tuned to some unwavering force deep inside the earth, and inside herself. The collection is punctuated by the auricular. We move with the resonance of the narrator’s voice as text transforms into song, and song into sound. Finally, language performs-like the vibration of a tuning fork. Meaning forgoes and appears in mysterious transformations like alchemy. In the Pope’s Shrunken Territory songs on flute are ... composed for calliope or a clown Mythical beasts are unmistakably real. In 'The Labyrinth Spoke' they are overcome by an army of me made of light the image is so subtly vivid and suitably fantastical, to make bearable the unthinkable. Whilst words become instruments, we inhabit the earth as fallen stars and are fed from cuttle fish spoons. Love is all substance (in fact it is the marrow of our bones) and women are both gods and gardens bound for the sky. To read these poems is to heal with spells. Rest assured when the beast rears its head, you are in safe hands. Safe travels.

Sophia Dowson Collins

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