Harry Josephine Giles

Deep Wheel Orcadia is a magical first: a science-fiction verse novel written in the Orcadian dialect, as well as the first full-length work of adult fiction in the Orkney language for over fifty years.

Deep Wheel Orcadia

Deep Wheel Orcadia is a magical first: a science-fiction verse novel written in the Orcadian dialect, as well as the first full-length work of adult fiction in the Orkney language for over fifty years. The inhabitants of Deep Wheel Orcadia – a huge space station with a suspiciously large amount in common with contemporary Orkney – is host to a rich and varied cast, who weave a compelling, lyric and effortlessly readable story around themes of place and belonging, work and economy, generation and gender politics, love and desire – all with the lightness of touch, fluency and musicality one might expect of one the most naturally talented poets to have emerged from Scotland in recent years. The book also comes with a parallel translation into startlingly playful and vivid English, so the reader will miss no nuance of the original. Harry Josephine Giles hails from Orkney, and is already widely known as a fine poet and spellbindingly original performer of their own work; Deep Wheel Orcadia strikes out into new and uncharted space.

A timely and innovative poetry collection from the author of the genre-defying Deep Wheel Orcadia, the first poetry winner of the Arthur C. Clarke Award, bestowed in 2022. I raise my great foot over the city of speech. My chest is bound beneath two straps. The one is named diversity and the other is named inclusion. When I sweep my arms through the thick air, blessings fall to the folk below. And my foot answers their prayer: silencing. So begins Them! by Harry Josephine Giles, a challenging and subversive collection of poems about trans life as it is lived now, through the lenses of work, technology, and ecology. Witty, candid, furious, and always compelling, Them! is equally dynamic in its range of forms, featuring visually innovative textual disruptions, prose poems, lyrics, and erasure. Giles negotiates the fraught and fruitful space between the worlds of "online" and the "outside," and how they fuse and diverge in the imagination. This collection arrives at a time when trans rights are at the forefront of public discourse and will speak to a young and informed readership. It includes the poem "May a Transsexual Hear a Bird?" anthologised in 100 Queer Poems (Penguin, 2021).

Them!

A Scotsman Poetry Book of the Year Them! by Harry Josephine Giles is an exuberant collection of poems about trans life as it is lived today, through the lenses of work, technology and ecology. Witty, candid, furious, and always compelling, Them! negotiates the fraught and fruitful space between the worlds of ‘online’ and the ‘outside’, and how they fuse and diverge in the imagination. Giles’ visual poetics create an unusually dynamic reading experience as she finds new ways ‘to sing, shout and strike in the cracks of what’s possible’. At a time when trans rights are to the fore in public discourse, Them! is a zestful poetic intervention from one of this generation’s most necessary poets. 'A bold and inimitable tour-de-force' – Guardian

Harry Josephine Giles

About

Books

Join the club