Moults is a meditation on transformation and preservation, and of the poet’s own becoming through trauma, motherhood and late neurodivergent diagnosis. With an emotional strangeness, these are poems concerned with the death of things; poems which explore and play with memory, the dizziness of nostalgia and the grounding of hindsight; poems which question what is lost and what is retained in the cycle of an evolving identity. They are written from the earth as much as they are written from the body.

With a raw and brutal energy, Moults burrows into lepidopterology’s viscous erotics and the aesthetics of institutionalised madness to explore the folk horror qualities of motherhood. Fluttering on the monstrous borderland between teeming life and putrid death, these poems are feral charms and mutilated spells for shedding our human skin and becoming animal. – Nell Perry

An auricular poetics of transformation. The linguistic charge never dips in these poems, attuned as they are to the mulch of existence, and much beyond. Tillings creates a rhapsody that arrives via listening in. ‘The HEAD, by way of the EAR, to the SYLLABLE and the HEART, by way of the BREATH’ as Olson suggested. It’s myopic to consider this a debut publication (though it is). Moults reveals the vision of a poet who has been ready to publish for years. Expansive yet anatomically precise, poignant yet written in with flair, here the body is the poem, ‘digested / broken down / spit- gliding-beneath-the-gentle-ridgepinch-of-tongue’. Moults is both feast and gift. – James Byrne

In Moults the layers of the body are peeled away: bone, hair / other detritus globed / & rolled bitesize — and at times transformed: your body is a landscape. Tillings strips away the physical until the poems become beautiful voids that somehow resist being beautiful — a negative space for the overwhelm. They are poems of survival, poems of trauma, but they are also poems that approach emptiness and silence. They skirt the boundaries of inscape and outscape. The poems in Moults are performances of the everyday: I’m only faking the appearance of life, but at the same time they are capsules of desire and escape — of decomposition and death — and of course — rebirth. Moults is both beautiful and terrifying. Shed your skin — and read this book! – Stephen Emmerson

Moults is a visceral, unflinching collection that lingers long after reading. Jessica Tillings writes through love, loss, motherhood, and transition with a rare, unflinching clarity and precision. These poems pulse with transformation— of body, memory and desire, shedding and reforming as they go—at once raw and deeply tender. From the opening sequences of hunger and metamorphosis to meditations on death, motherhood, and the instability of self, Tillings writes with striking precision and emotional risk. There’s an exactness to the language that gives each piece a quiet intensity, with images that continue to unfold in the mind. Moults is a bold, haunting and powerful collection, marking a distinctive, compelling and necessary voice in contemporary poetry. – Cathy Butterworth

40pp