Hag Stone

May 2022 sees the launch of Georgina Wilding’s debut poetry collection, Hag Stone, out with Verve Poetry Press. She has received great praise for her work and is excited to share some of that here.

Roger Robinson on hag stone

“Georgina Wilding continually makes the quiet insight of the ordinary into something extraordinary in Hag Stone. Perhaps it’s the way her conceptual leaps work like magic in that they are strange, entrancing and affective. A writer who we all should keep a close eye on.”

John mccullough on hag stone

“In Georgina Wilding’s tender first book, imagination has a violent power for those forced to grow up in the shadows. A spinning dolls house becomes a tornado, pulling a speaker inside. A young woman dehumanized by those around her thrashes among sunken trollies in a pond, ‘asking for directions / back up to the surface of things.’ This darkness, however, also intensifies the hard-won delight elsewhere at astral travel to Butlins and the ability to transform into streetlamps, bushes, meals. A flock of quick-winged surprises await discovery in the corners of this passionate, dynamic debut.”

Henry normal on hag stone

“You might think you already know this poetry but you are wrong. These carefully chosen images are filtered through an individual mind rich with experience and craft. The use of language is deft and endlessly engaging. This is a somewhat dark adventure through a world where the view from the other side of the known surprises, intrigues and often disturbs. This is poetry with intent to jar your perspective and bares reading slowly and again in silence so you can experience a world of other and look back on your own reality and reflect.”

Clare Pollard on hag stone

“An absolutely incandescent debut. Georgina Wilding captures scenes from a brutal girlhood with a clarity that can't be unseen. Daring and devastating.”

Sean thomas dougherty on hag stone

“If I read this book without knowing Georgina Wilding was English, I would think these were translations from the daughter of Vasko Popa. Wilding has penned a book of sly surreal poems full of razored wit and tone shifts, a speaker who, Alice-like, shifts in size and age, trembling and tarrying in a world of gendered ironies, where hammerhead sharks are invited for tea, and red ants eat and regurgitate daughters. But despite their surreal turns, these are poems situated firmly in a brutal gendered world, with pills that take away children, where the fat girl drags you by the hair, where ‘Boys beat you until you wet on the stairs like a dog,’ where even the hours are ‘small,’ and we travel from dingy bars and uncles rolling joints, to find where a dead bee dies ‘So much pollen/dusted its body/ it must’ve crashed/ through a net of stars/ just to land there.’ For in the end,amidst the violence, there is more than can be held of beauty here. These are defiant poems, whose speakers are ‘Never on our knees, begging the moon.’ These are poems that will latch onto you like how ‘koi mouth cunt,’ and never let go. These are poems that ‘refuse to come home.’

Jenny Swann on hag stone

“A debut collection of exuberant, sad, funny, clever poems, many of which are likewise succinct and intriguing. They cover a wide range of subjects with a wide range of techniques, moving between realism and surrealism to make their point. While the range of subjects and imagery is varied, and often unexpected or unpredictable, certain themes circle throughout the collection. There are poems about a difficult childhood, about humiliation, hatred, anger, aggression and sheer joie de vivre. Wilding’s voice is distinctive, whether in softer, contemplative moments or full-on, head-on collisions with her inner and outer realities. This is definitely no boring read – indeed, as the irresistible opening line of ‘Cod’ declaims: ‘What a luxury it is to be boring.’”

Cathy Grindrod on hag stone

“Hag Stone is a collection rooted in a stark urban world of ‘sunken trollies and dropped dummies’, of local parks and plastic dolls’ houses, which, in this poet’s hands, frequently becomes transcendent; a landscape where ‘the last burning butts of a million cigarettes’ become ‘fallen stars we’re standing on in trainers’ or where ‘Origami swans from Rizlas walk the park.’ Recurring images and objects give a sense of searching and of an underlying menace at the edge of things. Georgina’s poems about childhood and the traumas of young adulthood are particularly powerful, and at times, in poems such as Perspectives and July, pack a heart-stopping punch.”