After You Were, I Am

LONGLISTED FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD This extraordinary debut heralds the arrival of a major new talent. In After You Were, I Am, charged moments from history collide with our own godless modern world. The book's three sections - ingenious rewritings of canonical prayers, dramatic monologues from the Pendle witch trials of 1612, and the divine tragedy of the Elizabethan magus John Dee - obsess over individual human characters and how our past informs (and informs on) our present. Ralphs's style is utterly distinctive; she is a modern metaphysical, tapping into a haunting, era-spanning utterance enlivened by the electric pulse of wordplay and imaginative conceit. This is poetry that in comprehending the past manages to make of it something utterly original and contemporary. 'Historical figures inspired two distinctive debuts: Elizabeth I's court magician John Dee is ventriloquised with dizzying wordplay in Camille Ralphs's metaphysical After You Were, I Am (Faber, £10.99)' Telegraph, Best Poetry of 2024 'Ralphs's mischievous, metaphysical debut riffs on great religious poets, revisits the victims of the Pendle Witch Trials and explores the life of Elizabethan conjuror John Dee. TFS' Telegraph, 'The 50 Best Books of 2024 - ranked'