Staff Picks: Foxes, Unicorns, and Ghostworms

Yrsa Daley-Ward’s new collection, , opens with a small explosion, a two-line poem called “Intro”: “I am the tall dark stranger / those warnings prepared you for.” The poems that follow pick up the dual meaning here—of threat and of erotic desire. Often, the two are intertwined, as when she writes of an affair, “Remember on the right night and / under the right light / any idea can seem like a good one.” Daley-Ward, who was raised by her religious grandparents in a small town in Northern England, self-published in 2014; it sold more than twenty thousand copies, a staggering figure for a self-published book, let alone of poetry. Penguin reissued an expanded edition, with forty additional pages, last month. The excellent long autobiographical “It Is What It Is” describes her brother’s heated reaction to their father’s funeral, and the breathlessness as she narrates their swift escape along the highway, thinking