You write about your mother and daughter, and the collection delves into women resisting society and taking up that space, through writing or otherwise.

I felt I had to write the poems I always wanted to read. There is little in the public realm about poems that tackle what we think of as small, domestic themes, motherhood, having a daughter, being a granddaughter, or daughter. These are seen as touchy-feely things and not weighty enough. Male writers rarely tackle these themes and women writers tend to think ‘nobody is going to take me seriously if I do’; people are always looking for a “cerebral intellectual” theme. But these are moments of which life is made up, for most of us. If you don’t take this inner life seriously and the everyday things we do as women, we are turning our faces away from lovely material and the world itself.

You record absences, disappearances, death, and grief. You touch upon your father, the death of students, and George Floyd. Could you elaborate on the absence in your work?

I keep circling back to this because when I was two, it was the start of the divorce process. My father just disappeared from my life and never reappeared. When there’s a death, you know the person has gone away, never to return. In this case, my father was gone, never to return, but it was a different kind of absence and disappearance. That kind of grief, you can’t explain. When I grew older, I realised it was not a unique experience because with friendships and relationships, people leave for whatever reason: jobs, migration, or they drift apart. How do you carry everyone in your life throughout — you can’t. There are also political disappearances, and forced disappearances — it’s a different ball game. How do you ever come to terms with it, or fill that gap?