Suzannah V. Evans’s debut collection of poems, Under the Blue, came out with Bloomsbury Poetry in September 2025 and is longlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize. During a launch event at Bookhaus in Bristol, fellow Bristol-based poet Jack Thacker sat down with Suzannah to discuss the collection’s engagement with questions of care, privacy and ecology. The following exchange grew from that conversation, touching on prose poetry, epistolary writing, epigraphs, endings, omissions, editing, and so much more. It’s a fascinating and wide-ranging exchange, and we’re excited to be able to share it with you here.
JACK:
I want to begin with a question about the form, in particular your proclivity for the prose poem. You’re clearly comfortable and more than adept in that mode, finding much variety in it. What do you find so generative about writing poems in prose?
SUZANNAH:
The prose poem is endlessly fascinating to me as a form. Partly because of the ‘obvious’ paradox inherent in juxtaposing prose (the ordinary) with poetry (the heightened) – the prose poem feels rule-breaking from the outset. There’s also a sense of overspill – the sentences can’t be contained and they flow beyond the traditional line breaks of poetry. In that sense, Howard Hodgkin’s painting Water – which is on the cover of Under the Blue – feels like an apt reflection of both the watery parts of the book and the prose poem form itself. There’s something both fluid and messy about Hodgkin’s brushstrokes, and he paints directly onto the wooden frame of the painting, breaking the ‘rules’ and expectations about where paint should go just as the prose poem troubles an easy understanding of form. Care, too, can be messy, can be hard to contain.
When I was writing Under the Blue, I was also interested in the idea that prose poems might be more accessible than line-broken poetry, drawing in less frequent readers of poetry. We encounter prose all the time and perhaps feel more adept in handling it, whereas for some readers poems can feel more like a puzzle to be solved – maybe a hangover from encountering poetry in school. And then a prose poem both is and isn’t about its form. While for me the formal questions are absolutely there, a prose poem lets its subject matter shine through without the ‘distractions’ of obvious formal games so that the reader gets straight to the heart of the matter. But then there are all sorts of subtle formal shapes and references in play too, such as the fact that a square prose poem might resemble a room in a house, and therefore playfully nods to the origin of the word ‘stanza’. So the more domestic focus of some of the poems in Under the Blue is intended to subvert Baudelaire’s fascination with the city in his prose poems of Le Spleen de Paris.
Charles Simic talked to his editor about the problem of categorising the poems in his book The World Doesn’t End. ‘You have to call them something’, the editor said, ‘so that the bookstore knows under what heading to shelve the book’. When I was thinking about how to talk about the writing in Under the Blue, the word that first came to me was ‘texts’. I also like ‘postcards’ and ‘letters’. Those terms feel just as true to me as ‘prose poems’.
JACK:
That’s interesting, because when you refer to these poems as postcards or letters, other dimensions are added, ones that evoke the public privacy of the lyric but also modes of correspondence, informality, ephemerality. When and why did you settle on epistolary-inspired forms for this work?
SUZANNAH:
The poems started as quite literal postcards. It began with the first section: after I wrote the poems, I sent them on postcards to friends and enjoyed the idea of poems travelling through the post. The second section takes this form in a different direction so that the texts become more like ‘anti-postcards’ – the sort of thing that you might not send to a friend. They play with the idea of the postcard as both a private and public medium, i.e. addressed to an individual, but readable to anyone who flips the postcard over. That felt fitting for the subject matter, which is intimate but shared with the reader. I’m also drawn to the idea of the postcard as a glimpse or glance.
I love the materiality of postcards – how you can hold them, flip them over, jot something down on them, fold them, repurpose them. That idea of touch and holding is crucial to the book. I’ve always had an intimate relationship with postcards, pinning them up on my walls so that I’m surrounded by miniature artworks. On my desk right now I have postcards of work by Frances Featherstone, Ithell Colquhoun, Cornelia Parker, and Christina Riley, some of which I gathered, some of which were sent to me. I have stacks and stacks of postcards from when I lived in France. They offer a sort of alternative visual history of a life.
Three further thoughts about postcards. In her book Thunderclap, the art critic Laura Cumming writes that ‘pictures can shore you up, remind you who you are and what you stand for’. For the novelist Paul Magrs, ‘The things a writer publishes are just postcards; extended cards sent back from the distance they’ve reached’. And speaking of postcards sent by Elizabeth Bishop, the critic Langdon Hammer suggests that ‘Unlike a letter, which typically suggests a chain of communication, most postcards don’t call for a response. In this sense, the postcard has a one-off, standalone quality not unlike a poem’s.’ I like the idea of dispatching a poem so that it belongs to the reader instead of the writer.
As for letters, writing letters is very much something that I do and so it feels natural that that form came into the book. Letter-writing happened around the edges of the collection as I wrote to friends for advice and guidance and sent further poems in the post. Robert Browning made a distinction between speaking and singing in poetry. To me, the postcards of the collection speak and the letters (I hope) sing.
JACK:
There are some wonderful final lines in these poems, for instance: ‘The black rocks rise out of the sea like wedding cakes’ (‘Picnic’); ‘My mother’s hand like an injured butterfly’ (‘Postcard on a Christmas Night’); and I also really like ‘I go upstairs. I sing’ (‘Letter to My Father’). How do you know when to round off a postcard poem or letter poem, and is that different from closing out a poem written in a more received form?
SUZANNAH:
Thank you! That’s a very good question. It’s very different. Partly because with a received form you have a set of parameters in your mind and you can see the shape from the outset. For example with a sonnet, unless it’s a very experimental sonnet, you know that it will have fourteen lines and look like a little square on the page; you know where the ‘turn’ appears; you know that an option is to close with a rhyming couplet. With a prose poem all the movement is in the sentences. It’s almost a bodily feeling in terms of when it should stop.
JACK:
I want to talk about your choice of epigraphs as well. There’s one from Virginia Woolf, another from Baudelaire, and there’s an epigraph from Annie Ernaux which precedes the ‘Postcards from Jasper Street’ section. There’s also the italicised fragment inspired by Theseus’s paradox about the planks of wood and the boat, which is a different kind of epigraph. Which one of these are you most fond of, and is there a particular reason why it resonates with you in the context of this collection?
SUZANNAH:
You carry words you love around in your head, but there’s something wonderful about seeing them alongside your poems in a book. That Virginia Woolf epigraph from To the Lighthouse is my favourite: ‘All that in idea seemed simple became in practice immediately complex; as the waves shape themselves symmetrically from the cliff top, but to the swimmer among them are divided by steep gulfs, and foaming crests.’ That captures absolutely what I feel the book is about – an attempt to bridge the gap between how something appears from far off (waves moving symmetrically) and what it feels like to live that reality close up (steep gulfs, and foaming crests).
Care, from a distance, can appear very ordered and organised, but my actual experiences of caregiving feel very different, as if certain moments or movements are steep waves to be negotiated one after the other after the other. Woolf’s waves heave against the other waves in the collection – the opening wave of the title poem, the rocking bathwater at the close – and they also interact with Howard Hodgkin’s painting Water. I like the idea of the flat surface of the prose poem being disturbed by all of these undertows and choppy currents, and I wanted the sea to be a continual presence in echo of Woolf’s lighthouse. That word ‘symmetrically’ is also very important in the later context of illness.
JACK:
There’s another epigraph which doesn’t feature in your book but which was running through my mind as I read the second section and that’s Marianne Moore’s famous epigraph to her Selected Poems, ‘Omissions are not accidents’. Would you be able to say a few words about the omitted material in the ‘Postcards from Jasper Street’ and how the process of censoring or subtracting from them might have added something that otherwise wouldn’t be given expression? I’m thinking in particular of ‘Postcard with a Rhythm’, which is omitted its entirety, but there are other partially redacted examples.
SUZANNAH:
It sounds like an odd thing to say, but I’m very interested in poems with no words. There’s a poem in my first pamphlet Marine Objects / Some Language which is formed of just the title and then two square brackets (‘Give Me Your Two Hands and I’ll Show You an Amphora’), where the square brackets stand in for hands. So for me that feeling of square-brackets-as-hands carries over into the omissions in Postcards from Jasper Street where the redacted words are somehow held by those marks. To what extent can you take away the basic material of a poem (words) and have it still be a poem? The poetic epigraph about the planks of wood and the boat gestures to that question. It’s partly a formal interest. How much of a poem needs to remain for its core essence to come through? And then what happens if you confront a reader with silence? How can those silences be communicated or shared in a performance?
The omissions also centre process. When I was first thinking about what to do with the poems and how to handle material which draws on (but does not map fluently onto) some of my own experiences, I wanted to weave some of my questions into the poems themselves. Initially I’d thought about cutting some of the material and then smoothing the poems over, so that that part of the editorial process took place behind the scenes, but ultimately I wanted the gaps, the redactions, to be visible. The reader can see that there is an empty space, and that sparks questions about why there is a gap and what it might mean to withhold something or not talk about it. So it becomes a question of boundaries – what the speaker chooses to share and keep private – while at the same time gesturing to all the ways that it can be very difficult to talk about care both within and beyond the space of a poem.
JACK:
So these poems draw attention to care as a process, in the enactments of care they describe and the way they express the care taken in writing them and publishing them. To take that further, what are our larger responsibilities of care in poetry, and how do you think they might have changed in recent times – in a climate emergency, in the aftermath of a pandemic, in a crisis of care in this country? For me, these poems are an essential expression in that context, but how do you feel more generally about your own responsibilities as a poet?
SUZANNAH:
Recently when I was running a creative writing course on poetry and care, I kept a list of all the times I encountered that term in advertising – ‘sourced with care’, ‘conscious care for all’. I was doing all sorts of strange things like taking photos of cartons of water and packaging for soap: so much marketing involves a false assurance of care. One of the things that poetry can do is reclaim that language and explore the true meanings and resonances of care, in a way that might contribute to a collaborative sense of what care is or can be. At the heart of care is the idea that we are all connected, part of the same thing. I believe that this is true of literature too – everything that is written becomes part of the huge web of things that have been written, and all of these poems, stories, texts shift our understanding of what has come before and what will come after. Writing about care expands that web.
But the crux of it is interconnection, and that is something to especially hold onto now. We all live in relation to each other, and we all need the care that will help us not only to survive but to really live and flourish. The same holds true for the planet. Everything is connected. Climate emergencies, Covid-19, the crisis of care – these all intersect and expose root inequalities. Disabled people are twice as likely as any other group to die in natural disasters, and two out of every three victims of the Covid-19 pandemic were disabled. (See Disability Rights UK.) The Covid-19 pandemic is and has been a mass-disabling event, and so it’s urgent that we continue to think about care in this context of increased and increasing disability. And while we saw a shift towards mutual care at the beginning of the pandemic, it feels like we’ve lapsed back to centring individual responsibility when it comes to health and risk. It’s also interesting to compare discourse on the climate crisis and the pandemic. We’re comfortable talking about environmental pollution, but there’s much less acknowledgement of the importance of indoor air quality for public health and wellbeing. I would love to see HEPA filters and good ventilation in all indoor public spaces, and it seems very sensible to continue to mask in crowded spaces like doctors’ surgeries.
So part of it involves an acceptance of how bound up everyone is with everyone else. And what the poet can do is write about that and keep refining and extending the vocabulary of care.
JACK:
Marine ecologies; ecologies of care. What connects those two interests? How did you create a sense of those two things speaking to each other in this book? Was that something that you crafted and cultivated, or were the connections that you make between the waves of the ocean and waves of ecstasy and anguish an aspect of the project that emerged later on?
SUZANNAH:
Elizabeth Bishop has a wonderful poetic sequence about the inhabitants of a rockpool. The sequence is both fragmented and connected by these creatures: the claw of a ‘frivolous crab’ reaches out of its own poem to tap the shell of the giant snail in the next. It’s as if the poems create their own ecology where everything overlaps and ripples together. Each prose poem is connected and part of the texture of the whole. I’m always thinking about the sea and I’m struck by the marine environment as this very delicate ecosystem with fragmentary and interacting elements. Bishop’s rockpool is a changeable and slippery place, shaped by the tides, and every creature there has some role to play in the life of it. So those two kinds of ecologies (marine ecologies, ecologies of care) are about shared entanglement, and all the ways that both human and more-than-human lives rub up against those of others. Care too involves multiple overlapping elements. My experience is that if one element is removed, everything comes tumbling down. Everyone is needed to shore up everyone else.
JACK:
I also want to ask you about the editing process. What changed for you between first drafts and final edits – is there a change you made that helped you to see your own work in a new light?
SUZANNAH:
Much of the initial editing process for me with prose poetry is about cutting. I also obsessively reread what I’ve written. If I notice something that snags at me I’ll often leave it and see if it has the same effect the third or fourth or seventh time round. If it does, I’ll change it. Sometimes these are very minute changes, but they feel important. Reading aloud is very helpful for this too – sometimes your voice and ear will suggest something that your eye will miss. I also really love the editorial process of being read by other people. Hearing thoughts from sharp-minded and experienced readers gives you something to bounce off. It can open you up to improvement or, on the flip side, strengthen your resolve and trust in what is already there. One of my favourite editorial suggestions was to experiment with the ‘line breaks’ in the poetic epigraph about the planks of wood. My initial feeling for this fragment was that I wanted it to be square and small (like a postage stamp) and I hadn’t thought of it as having line breaks, but it gives me a small surge of pleasure now when I look at the words at the ‘line ends’.
JACK:
And what about the book’s structure? One of the things that struck me on reading it, both for the first time and since then, is that the moments that occupy a tone that is closer to horror than ecstasy sneak up on you as a reader. There’s threat and unease in that opening sequence, but suddenly, almost out of nowhere, you’re in moments of raw anguish and vulnerability, especially as you read deeper into the Jasper Street pieces. How did you decide on this structure, and was that effect a conscious design? The same goes for the letters at the end – is that always how you wanted to underline the book?
SUZANNAH:
All of the poems surge from that opening poem with the wave and the seizure. Just as a wave might shift something to shore, an object, say, that will keep bumping up against the sand, small elements from that poem refract across the collection – so when the word ‘seizes’ reappears in different context in a later poem (one person seizes the wrist of another) there is a minute echo back to that first instance, almost in the way that a difficult or traumatic event can fragment memory. The miniature sequence-within-a-sequence which centres on Christmastime is for that reason out of order. And then there’s the stumbling of that first poem, which is picked up by the stumbling waiter in ‘Coffee’, in various other poems, and in the line ‘They might be about to fall, or about to dance’, which feels to me like one of the important lines in the book. (I’m reading Helen Garner’s diaries at the moment and she cites a line from a poem she encountered: ‘Nobody knows whether I am staggering or dancing.’ Which also makes me think of the waving and drowning in Stevie Smith’s poem.) That oscillation is key, and the opening Baudelaire epigraph about ecstasy and horror has been in my mind for years and years. So in terms of the structure, it was less a conscious design and more feeling my way between these different states. It was different with the letters. The first two sections were very private projects, written without any thought of publication. The letters are both private and public, and I wanted them to lift what came before.
JACK:
Do you have a favourite poem from the book?
SUZANNAH:
I do. ‘Postcard with Glances’. A playful one.
JACK:
And finally, what’s next for you? Are you working on anything new now that these poems are finally signed, sealed and sent, as it were?
SUZANNAH:
Yes, I’m always working on something, even if it’s right at the back of my mind rather than on paper. I’ve been thinking more about the highs and lows of the body, and how it feels to live in a body. Some of that thinking has led to poems about running. I’m interested in further testing out the prose poem – the trembling line between poetry and prose, but also how those two elements interact when they share space on a page or in a book. And then I’m exploring care in different ways, and continuing to write about the sea. I also have a nephew and I’d love to write something for him. An important thing, I find, is to have an active notebook.
Suzannah V. Evans is a poet, researcher and educator based in Bristol. Her debut Bloomsbury Poetry collection is Under the Blue, longlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize, and her work has received the Ivan Juritz Prize and a Northern Writers’ Award. Her poetry pamphlets are Brightwork and Marine Objects / Some Language, and she is the editor of All Keyboards are Legitimate: Versions of Jules Laforgue (Guillemot Press).
Jack Thacker is a writer based in Bristol. His poetry has appeared in numerous online and print magazines and has been broadcast on national radio. He is the winner of the Charles Causley International Poetry Competition and has been the writer in residence at the Museum of English Rural Life and Lighthouse Arts Centre. His pamphlet-length collection is Handling, which came out with Two Rivers Press in 2018.
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