PRE-ORDER To my father, now dead in room 318 by Madeleine Kruhly
PRE-ORDER To my father, now dead in room 318 by Madeleine Kruhly
Forthcoming 16 October 2025 - Pre-order now
Grief will always be of the most private and yet public of human emotions. In Madeleine Kruhly’s debut To My Father, Now Dead in Room 318, her poems track the loss of a father across a geography of feeling, impulse, sorrow and confusion. Visually arresting, unafraid and moving, Kruhly’s language fixates on the absence of not only a father but a shapeshifting symbol of knotted masculinity. The poems straddle the space between care and threat, love and danger, anger and tenderness. This is a book that resists settling on any obvious conclusion, nor does it want pity or sympathy from its reader. Instead, it draws us into the labyrinth of itself, unravelling across an almost synaesthesic landscape, leaving us to be alone inside the immediacy of the sensation itself.
‘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.