PRE-ORDER: lamping wild rabbits by Simon Maddrell
PRE-ORDER: lamping wild rabbits by Simon Maddrell
* Forthcoming 12 February 2026 - Pre-order now *
In Simon Maddrell’s wide and bracing world, childhood orbits the voice of a distant and sometimes dangerous parent. Memories of sex parties, dead friends and estranged lovers straddle the spaces between feeling and thought, loss and fatalism. lamping wild rabbits is a brave and expansive multiverse, exploring sexuality, queer desire, memory recall and testimony. With poems that pay homage to the late Derek Jarman, to verses which situate themselves in and around the Isle of Man, exploring Britain’s colonial presence through the subverted interplay of English and the Manx language.
A poly-vocal and multifaceted debut which is unafraid to confront the shame and stigma of HIV, while never allowing the poems to lose shape or pace, altering the lens to bring the reader’s attention to birdsong and the queer body in nature.
Maddrell has achieved a distinct and totally convincing sound through the literary geography of lamping wild rabbits, one that gives the impression it’s been everywhere and returned because it survived.
‘An alarmingly accomplished debut. A long way now from traditional elegy, Kruhly’s poems speak of nourishment and squalor, palliative care and dirty linen, tenderness and harm. Their unnerving domestic noire is both off-kilter and riveting: one dare not look away.’ —Fiona Benson
‘This moving collection from Madeleine Kruhly is a disintegrated study on care and inheritance that moves states and concepts of emotion, growth and home, playfully and carefully. It’s a tender evocation of patri and matrilineal relationships, smarting and considered, powerful and gentle.’ —Rachael Allen
About Madeleine Kruhly
Madeleine Kruhly is a poet and editor from Radnor, Pennsylvania. She works in London, and lives outside of it with her husband. To my father, now dead in room 318 is her debut collection.